Gitlab fixed, back on track
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After my last post, I decided to dive into our Gitlab setup and see if I could fix the problem. In case you’ve forgotten, the problem was the latest pushed code was broken. So, our master branch was pointing to code that was not working when pulled and deployed. The pushed code had changes to the gradle and build setup, not java code, so that’s why it was pretty broken. None of us know git all that well (but let’s be honest, who does?) so it has taken us a little while to remedy our setup.

I dove in and fixed it learning a lot about git in the process. I basically had to create a bunch of temporary branches with my current working code and rewrite history — basically making it look like the last changes had never happened. I set the origin/master branch to my working code with changes.

After this debacle, we decided that we should be using branches more often, keeping the origin/master branch for production, working, thoroughly tested code.

Gitlab, and archiving!
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FINALLY, we have a stable Git environment. On hopper (cluster.earlham.edu) I’ve set-up something called Gitlab. Gitlab is an open source git repo hosting environment. For those of you that are familiar with Github, Gitlab is like a self-hosted version of that. I chose Gitlab because it’s private (in Github, you have to pay for a premium membership to have private repositories) and it’s cleaner and has better access control than just doing it through a user’s directory on the machine.

You can see the Gitlab setup here – Earlham Gitlab. There’s a group called field-science where we are going to host all our code. I’ve already created projects for our Android work. The old android code is now in the archive-android project. This means that it is read-only! Yay! Starting fresh for Android $FIELDSCIENCE app. There’s a new project called FieldScience that we will use for the new app, which I’ve already created the shell for in Android Studio and pushed it to the Gitlab. Yay for cleaning and organization.

On Gitlab, we will store the visualization code, the database code, the arduino/sensor code. All the code! This makes it a lot easier when trying to find stuff later (our old Arduino code is all over the place).