Dinis Cruz Blog

You can get the latest version from https://leanpub.com/Practical_Git for FREE (by choosing the $0 minimum price).

Here is the email I send to my readers:

Hi, thanks for being reader of my Practical Git and GitHub book. I just released a new version which contains a large number of content and images fixes.

This version is very similar to the previous release, but I'm planning to make big changes in the next months.

I'm going to add a number of new chapters and remove content that might be better in a different book.

I really would like your feedback, so please don't hesitate to contact me at dinis.cruz@owasp.org or directly at the GitHub repo that contains all content and current Issues: https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git/issues

After creating a number of Leanpub based books, I've come up with a workflow that works quite well for me.

This workflow is based on Managing LeanPub book's Markdown content using Git and GitHub (synced to back to LeanPub via DropBox) which is supported by the following technologies:

The original releases of my Practical AngularJS and Practical Git books were made using LeanPub's DropBox model, which was OK, but lacked two massive features: version control and interface for community interactions.

Inspired by Dennis Groves' idea and workflow described in OWASP Press and using LeanPub with GitHub and DropBox, I was able to use Git and GitHub to track changes on these books.

Which means that from now, not only can I use the GitHub repositories to track/document changes I make, but you can also submit your ideas/problems directly as GitHub issues and fixes as Pull Requests :)

Here is the GitHub repo for the AngularJS book: https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_AngularJS

Here is the GitHub repo for the Git/Hub book: https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git

For an example of how to use GitHub to submit and fix an content problem see this issue https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git/issues/1 which was fixed by this commit https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git/commit/7c53c396f4209bb2521dccadbfcfbe8c90318ba7

After releasing "Practical AngularJS", here is an equivalent book containing my Git and GitHub related posts.

The book has 411 pages and is made of 60 blog posts published in the last 18 months.

As with the first release of the AngularJS book, I'm starting with the original chronological/published order, and will try later to figure out a better logical way to group these posts together.

The article's Html was converted by LeanPub into Markdown, who also created the eBook versions linked below (pdf, mobi, epub and online)

The problem was simple, there were a number of commits made to an TeamMentor GitHub repo that I wanted to completely reverse (without re-writing history).

For reference this happened when I was doing some 'Link fixing' tests on a server that was configured to auto commit to GitHub (which meant that the option to do a pure git reset --hard was not available since it would break the TM server)

In this case, the last good commit was e794cc839689dfc7915099d39972abde643a969d and the last bad commit was c53002083e85673f9a4dd7e6dbd2a37bc7ff9e2f (currently HEAD of master)

My first idea was to just do a git revert to the e794cc839689dfc7915099d39972abde643a969d which worked ok locally.

But I struggled to merge it with the master HEAD, because git was being too cleaver , since it realised that these two commits were compatible, and just fast-forwarded into the most recent one (vs doing a 'reverse merge')

Continuing from where Using TeamMentor 3.4 TBot admin pages to load and sync a Library hosted on GitHub left, this post shows how to use the same technique to sync TeamMentor's UserData with a GitHub repo.

For more details on how the UserData repo/folder fits within TeamMentor's architecture, see these posts:

Serge asked me to help making some changes to the TeamMentor's Asp.NET 3.5 library, and since we need a test server to look at what might be changed (and run some scripts) this is a good time to show about how to use the TeamMentor's 3.4 Tbot pages to load a Library hosted on GitHub

I will also show, how once the TM server is configured with a library using a Git url,  changes can be auto committed/pushed to that Git server, every-time there is a content edition using TM's web editors.

Step 1: Preparing the target TM server

Lets start with an Azure hosted TeamMentor server, for example this one:

One of the areas that tend to case some problems with GitHub 'Forking model' workflow, is the need to have the Forks updated with the commits that have been added to the Parent repo (i.e. the repo that was used to create the Fork from).

To see real-word examples (and pains) of this issue, take a look at these posts:

• How to update a forked GitHub repo (in this case tm-sme/Lib_Vulnerabilities) 
• Syncing all releases to the same commit and Tag (for TeamMentor v3.4) 
• Fixing the Merge conflict caused by one extra commit on TeamMentor master 

As you can see by the recent eclipse related posts, I have been working on a Plugin for Eclipse that shows TeamMentor guidance to users that have access to the Fortify Eclipse plugin (and *.fpr files). We are now in the final stages of releasing the first public version (1.6.0) which is actually made of two parts: An Eclipse Plugin builder (which is Open Source) and a small 'Fortify Specific' code-mapping script. Very soon these will be in separate projects, but for now they are all hosted at the TeamMentor/TeamMentor_Eclipse_Plugin.

This post is just to document the current GitHub development model and where to find the main parts of this release.

Today I helped to update the tm-sme/Lib_Vulnerabilities repo which is a fork of the TMContent/Lib_Vulnerabilities and is being auto-updated in real-time when changes made to the https://sme.teammentor.net/ server (i.e every time there is a content change in https://sme.teammentor.net there is a server-side git commit, followed by a git pull to tm-sme/Lib_Vulnerabilities (which is a pretty sweet workflow))

The issue we had was how to push the changes from tm-sme/Lib_Vulnerabilities into the TMContent/Lib_Vulnerabilities  repo, so that they can be synced back to https://vulnerabilities.teammentor.net

Note: this workflow would had been easier if the two repos where in sync, but it happened that there was one commit made to TMContent/Lib_Vulnerabilities (which is the master repo) on the 13th of Dec (d26f385) in between a bunch of updates to the tm-sme/Lib_Vulnerabilities repo (done automatically by TeamMentor). Bottom line: at this stage the repos are not compatible, which is why the GitHub Pull Requests don't work.

This is a bit of house keeping, as you can see by the Fixing the Merge conflict caused by one extra commit on TeamMentor master  and Git Flow - Moving patches from one Commit into another Commit posts, not doing this has already cause us some pain in the past.

So after some pushes and pulls (of both commits and tags) I now have the main TeamMentor repos all synchronised at the 72ca4b5d3322901266ca294678cbe15aa343a4b3 commit:

Inspired by Google’s Two Factor Authentication workflow, last month GitHub did the same thing.

I just enabled it, and I strongly recommend that you do it to.

As per the instructions in GitHub’s Two-factor Authentication post, the first step is to go to https://github.com/settings/admin and click on the Set up two-factor authentication’ button:

On the 3.4 Release of TeamMentor (which was the first release we really used Git Flow on development (see this great presentation on Git Branching Model) we ended up with a situation where the commit that was the parent of all feature/fix branches was off-by-one the master of the TeamMentor/Master repository (we also had to do a bunch of back-porting of fixes into that commit, see Git Flow - Moving patches from one Commit into another Commit post)

In practice this means that the TeamMentor/Master graph currently looks like this:

After the fixes explained in the Git Flow - Moving patches from one Commit into another Commit  post and the reset of the TeamMentor 3.4 branch, Michael reapplied his other changes/fixes to the correct 3.4 commit, and I’m now in the process merging his Pull Requests into the 3.4_Release branch (and eventually into the master branch).

This post walks through my current workflow.

At the moment there are a number of Pull Requests to process:

This (longish) post will cover detailed git workflows and is part of the series of blog posts that show how we use the Git Flow workflow to manage TeamMentor's source code (you will also see practical applications of GitHub's powerful  of powerful features like Network Graphs and Pull Requests).

The key problem that we are going to solve, is the situation created by Michael Hidalgo’s TeamMentor fixes/commits/branches that were done against an commit (38bfcd54d8046372c0ace2409324ecc965761504) which was originally planed to be part of the next release, but we decided that the next 3.4 Release of TeamMentor will be based on the current 3.3.3 version (with is based on the earlier commit: b97a470ffa173d67a9c74373593eea03eb7a2da4).

The key reason is that he  38bfcd54d8046372c0ace2409324ecc965761504 commit (currently the parent of Michael’s fixes/branches) is not stable and is going now to be the basis of the 3.5_Release (this code contains a number of big changes which need more TLD and testing: native ASP.NET MVC routing, better Git support, native Markdown editor, depreciation of HTML WYSIWYG editor, and more)

In a nutshell, we need to re-apply Michael’s bug fixes to an earlier commit than the one used (i.e. backport those commits).

This post shows one way to use GitHub to update the main development branch of TeamMentor.

At the moment TeamMentor/Dev repo  is at version 3.3 – Dev 4

Now that the two P0 issues are marked as fixed (after a round of QA):

In order to set-up a site for the http://o2platform.com domain, I just used GitHub Pages to create and publish a brand new site.

This is what it looks like:

This is how I updated the 3.3 version of TeamMentor to 3.3.1, which contained a fix for the Password expiry cannot be set from the main TM GUI issue

Since we are now using the Vincent Driessen GitFlow branching model (see also these Git-Flow scripts and this great presentation), after the issue 437 was reported+prioritised, all development happened on a Feature Branch called HotFix_3_3_1 (which was created from a Pull Request from Ian's own 437-Password-Expiry dev branch).

Once TM's QA (ie. Roman) was happy with the patch, it was time to push it to the first batch of TM production servers (my responsibility was to update the sme.teammentor.net server, while Roman updated the tm4tm.teammentor.net , and the rest will be updated by Michael K + Michael H). Technically I did a pull from those servers :)

Here are my steps: