Labs

Throughout the semester, all Connected Objects lab work will take place in the coursework repository initialized by GitHub Classrooms.

Last year, there were 8 labs in total, each worth 1-5%, comprising a total of 27% of the final grade[1].

This year should be similar (there may be more labs, but each worth less).

Lab listing

• L1: Developer Environment Setup (Due: 2026-02-01; Worth: 1%)

  Set up and use lab software

  Read more ...

General Lab Instructions

The following sections contain instructions that are relevant for all labs.

There is a bit of set-up for lab-0, but it will be re-used for future labs.

[!NOTE] The instructions and starter code for each lab are stored in the lab-* directories of the repository. For example, instructions for Lab 0 are located in lab-0/README.md, and various other files in lab-0/ are provided as starter code.

Branches

Your repository begins with just one branch:

• instructions:

  • This branch is set to track my Labwork-Upstream[2] repository.

  • DO NOT commit any work to this branch!

  • Your instructions branch will be overwritten by any changes I make to the upstream instructions branch.

After lab-0, your repository will have the following branches:

• lab-0:

  • All of your lab work will take place on lab-* branches you create for each lab

• completed-labs:

  • Once your lab has been graded, we will merge your lab branch into completed-labs.

  • More instructions for creating/using this branch in lab-0.

  • Similar to instructions, you should not make direct commits to this branch.

Create a branch for each lab

For each lab, you will create a new branch. For example, to begin lab 0, you will create a branch called lab-0.

There are many ways to do this:

• Using the GitHub website

• Using VSCode

• Using the command line

Using the GitHub website

See the “using GitHub” section of the course notes on this topic.

Using VSCode

See the “using VSCode” section of the course notes on this topic.

Using the command line

See the “using the command line” section of the course notes on this topic.

Keep instructions up to date

As the semester progresses, new labs will appear in this repository on the instructions branch.

A “Sync fork” dropdown will appear whenever the upstream repository has instruction updates

Committing your progress

As you make progress in the lab work, use git commit to make commits on the lab work branch (for example, lab-0 for work on lab 0).

To upload your progress for e.g. to get work done on other computers, use git push to update the lab work branch on the remote repository.

Create a completed-labs branch

Once you have made a few commits to your lab-* working branch, you can set up a Pull Request which I will use to give you feedback.

First, created a branch called completed-labs in this repo.

Creating this branch is the same as creating any other branch. Just make sure the source branch is still instructions on your repo.

Next, create a pull request between your lab-* branch and the completed-labs branch:

Here is what your lab-0 (and all other lab) pull requests should look like: your-username wants to merge n commits into completed-labs from lab-*

You don’t have to wait until you’re finished your lab to make the pull request. As you continue pushing to lab-*, your commits will automatically show in the pull request:

After creating a 4th commit and pushing that commit to the lab-0 branch, the pull request was updated automatically.

After the lab deadline, I will put feedback in the pull request between your lab work branch and the completed-labs branch.

Troubleshooting

instructions branch has conflicts

In general, you should not make ANY commits to the instructions branch.

In case you do by accident, that’s okay – there are two steps:

1. If you want to keep the changes you made:

# Ensure you are on the instructions branch
git switch instructions

# How many commits do you need to undo? 
# The command you run changes depending on the number. Some examples:

# Undo just the most recent comment (one commit)
git reset --soft HEAD^

# Undo the last 3 commits
git reset --soft HEAD~3

# Check that you're no longer "ahead" of the instructions branches,
# and that your changes from the commits you've undone are now staged
git status

# Switch to your lab branch
git switch lab-0

# Redo the commits on lab-0

You can skip the above steps if you don’t care about your changes.

2. Discard the commits (let your instructions branch be overwritten by the upstream)

Click “Sync fork” and choose the “Discard commits” option.

On the instructions branch, you should Discard any commits you accidentally make to ensure your instructions are up to date

Force instructions to match upstream using git

To ensure your instructions branch is up to date with upstream, and doesn’t have any extra commits, you can add the upstream repo as another remote for your local repository.

# Double check that you are in the right repository, on the `instructions` branch
git switch instructions
git status

# Add the upstream
git remote add upstream https://github.com/420-6P3-W25/Labwork-Upstream/

# Verify that you now have two remote repositories:
#   origin: your repository
#   upstream: the upstream repository
git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/420-6P3-W25/connected-objects-labwork-hichael-maaf (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/420-6P3-W25/connected-objects-labwork-hichael-maaf (push)
upstream        https://github.com/420-6P3-W25/Labwork-Upstream/ (fetch)
upstream        https://github.com/420-6P3-W25/Labwork-Upstream/ (push

# Update all branches
git fetch --all
# here you will have to enter your token from the previous step! Open another terminal window and run
# pass github/token | clip.exe

# Force your instructions branch to be the same as the upstream/instructions branch
# Double check you are on the instructions branch
git status
git reset --hard upstream/instructions

# See that your branch is up to date with upstream/instructions and NOT origin/instructions
git status

# Force the change on your repositories origin/instructions
git push --force

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[1]

In the course outline, Labs+Assignments is 45%. The two assignments will be 9% + 9%

[2]

The word “upstream” when referring to repositories is technical but intuitive: your branch is “downstream” of mine, which means that any changes made to my repository are available to your repository (but not the other way around).