It happens to the best of us, sometimes we commit something that just simply wasn't ready, or maybe we're having a bad day and introduced a bug to the code. I've even seen scenarios where you've created a temporary workaround in your codebase and now you're ready to remove that workaround and put in a real fix. This lesson looks at using the git revert command to deal with these scenarios by creating new commits that reverse the changes of a previous commit.

In this tutorial we're going to use the git bisect command to do a little bit of debugging. We're all human, and sometimes bugs get introduced our software and we may not notice them for a while. Especially on fast moving projects. A good example of this would be a performance regression, and now you want to figure out what commit made everything run slower all of a sudden. Bisect allows us to do a binary search between a known good commit and a known bad commit and quickly narrow down which commit introduced the problem. From there it's much easier to figure out what exactly the problem is and fix it.

GitHub is a great, free service that lets you share your Git repositories online with others. In this tutorial, Blake gives a quick tour of our Git Series Example GitHub project, and then explains how pull requests work, letting you merge changes into the repository through the UI. Feel free to try it out by adding jokes to our new jokes.txt file!

This tutorial takes a look at applying a patch from Drupal.org to your local copy of a module or Drupal core using Git. Afterwards we'll look at how you can create your own patches, using git diff and git format-patch, in order to contribute code back to Drupal or any of the module's on Drupal.org. You can see a full Git workflow using GitHub in the lesson Git Workflow: Putting It All Together.

Additional resources

Git Best Practices: Upgrading the Patch Process article
Applying a patch in a feature branch

In this tutorial, Joe walks you through a typical Git workflow. We start with cloning a repository, creating a branch, and getting some work done. Then we go ahead and commit our work, merge it into the master branch, and push our changes back up to the remote repository.

We've now learned about all sorts of commands in git and the flags that accompany those commands. We've also seen that some of those commands can get to be a bit long and are used quite often. In this lesson we're going to take a look at how to create command aliases in our .gitconfig file so that we can have a shorthand for accessing some of these more esoteric commands. We'll also take a quick tour of Joe's personal .gitconfig file that he uses in his day-to-day work.

If you're reading this message, you use Open Source software. The last fifteen years has seen the meteoric rise of tools like Linux, Apache, Firefox, WordPress, Drupal and more; simplyusing Open Source is old hat. When it comes to building your company's web strategy around open source tools, though, the decisions can be fuzzier. The best-known arguments for Open Source are often ideological rather than pragmatic, and fail to account for the different needs of different projects and businesses.

In this Do it with Drupal session, Jeff Eaton will explain the no-nonsense pros and cons of Open Source, covering the big wins as well as the tradeoffs and common pain points. Whether your business is testing the Open Source water, betting the farm on community-maintained software, or open-sourcing its own creations, you'll learn how to avoid common pitfalls and set yourself up for success.

This video shows you how to create your own custom shortcuts for various commands. We'll look at some common aliases and see how to add them to our command line environment. This is super handy for commands that you type in all the time and don't want to go through the tedium of typing the whole thing out every time. For example, we show how to automatically go to a particular directory with just one word (e.g. type "clients" and go to the /Users/add1sun/lullabot/clients directory immediately).

In this lesson we show how everyone can help with the Drupal.org documentation. We take a quick look at some of the links and information that is available to everyone with a Drupal.org account, and then we dive in to make our first edit to an existing page. We run into Drupal.org's spam protection, so we also walk through getting ourselves on the no spam list for the site. After we complete our edit, we then see how to add our own new handbook page, by creating documentation for a contributed module, which doesn't have a page yet. We finish up by creating an issue in the module's issue queue, to get a link to our new page added to the module's project page. You'll see us use the Drupal.org issue queue in this video. For more detailed information about that, see our Getting Started in the Issue Queue video.

In this lesson, we take a tour of the *.drupal.org websites, as there is a lot more than just the main Drupal.org site. After our tour, we'll walk through getting an account, and see how that gives us access to all of the Drupal.org web properties. We'll play with our Dashboard, and join a group on groups.drupal.org, to become more active in the community — the best way to learn and get help. You'll see us use the Drupal.org issue queue in this video. For more detailed information about that, see our Getting Started in the Issue Queue video.

This video looks at the basics of working with MySQL from the command line. We get into the mysql environment and look at databases, tables and fields. We cover creating and deleting databases, creating a user, and querying within a particular database.

Note: In some places the command line prompt is cut-off. The YouTube version of this video doesn't have the cut-off problem. We are working on getting this fixed, but in the meantime, check out the YouTube version instead.

Command Line Basics 13: Using MySQL from Command Line (youtube.com)

This is an introduction to the Tail command, available on Unix/Linux systems. Tail has many applications, but this video concentrates on its basic usage and useful options, as they pertain to Drupal developers.

You'll learn how to take a quick peek at recent log messages from a single log file, how to do the same thing with multiple logs, as well as watching log files in real time! We'll finish up with a practical application, to see why this is useful.

Commands used in this video:

To view the documentation (or manual) for the tail command:
man tail

To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's access log file:
tail /var/log/apache2/access.log

To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's error log file:
tail /var/log/apache2/error.log

To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's error log file and continue to print new lines added to the file:
tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log

In this tutorial, I'll introduce the API Blueprint specification and take a look at a few tools we can use to provide documentation and testing for our API.

The tools we'll look at include:

• Apiary
• API Blueprint
• Dredd
• Aglio

By the end of the tutorial you'll have a better understanding of the API Blueprint specification and be able to use Dredd and Aglio to ensure your API documentation and testing stay up-to-date.

Self-check question: Could you write a script that could be run after every commit that would keep your documentation up-to-date, and provide API test results?

Additional resources

Apiary
API Blueprint
Dredd
Aglio

The command line can be a scary place for someone not familiar with interacting with a computer through text-only. We are so used to using GUIs to point and click our way through tasks. In this series we'll walk through some of the most common command line tasks to help you understand what is going on and be able to do some cool tricks yourself.

This is the first video in a series that shows basic command line usage for *nix systems, such as Linux, Mac OS X, and on Windows, using applications like Cygwin. This video shows the following commands and spends the most time explaining how to move around your file structure from the command line:

• pwd
• ls (and ls -al)
• less
• cd
• man
• clear

Note: this video was originally released August 31, 2009 on Lullabot.com.

The second video in the command line basics series, this one covers common commands for dealing with files; copying, moving and deleting them. We walk through examples for the following commands: cp, mv, and rm.

Just a a fair warning that I say the word "stuff" way too many times in this video. Please just bear with it.

Note: this video was originally released September 8, 2009 on Lullabot.com.

In this next video of our command line series, we will look at permissions and ownership of files and folders - how to understand the information you see and change it. It covers the following commands:

• chmod
• chown
• chgrp
• sudo

Note: this video was originally released September 16, 2009 on Lullabot.com.

This command line video covers the three most common commands for compressing and archiving files, including how to get them back out again. Most commonly you first hit the need for these when you download a file and need to get it uncompressed. We'll cover the following commands:

• zip
• unzip
• gzip
• gunzip
• tar

Note: this video was originally released October 28, 2009 on Lullabot.com.