disjoint thoughts

So I’m not a git or github master by any means. For the most part, I know enough commands to get by and to get myself into trouble every now and then. My experience so far has been good with git and github, but today I ended up banging my head on a wall while I tried to figure out what was going on. Follow me, on this little trip down a rabbit hole. Maybe someone can explain what’s going on here.

First I generate a rails app:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ rails foo

Then I add restful authentication, using the command listed in the install documentation:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ cd foo/
lappy:foo bsmith$ cd vendor/plugins/
lappy:plugins bsmith$ git clone git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git restful_authentication
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/foo/vendor/plugins/restful_authentication/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 1741, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (590/590), done.
remote: Total 1741 (delta 1010), reused 1641 (delta 957)
Receiving objects: 100% (1741/1741), 733.93 KiB | 831 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1010/1010), done.

Then I add everything to git:

lappy:plugins bsmith$ cd ../..
lappy:foo bsmith$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/foo/.git/
lappy:foo bsmith$ git add .
lappy:foo bsmith$ git commit -m ‘init’
[master (root-commit) f63c7ea] init
43 files changed, 8462 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 README
create mode 100644 Rakefile
…[followed by lots more output]

Then I pushed it to github:

lappy:foo bsmith$ git remote add github git@github.com:benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
lappy:foo bsmith$ git push github master
Counting objects: 64, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (56/56), done.
Writing objects: 100% (64/64), 79.32 KiB, done.
Total 64 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
* [new branch] master -> master

Next, I take a look at the vendor directory that got committed go github:

From screen shots

I assume that the little folder icon with an arrow means that the restful authentication code is being hosted elsewhere… as a submodule maybe? The folder is not clickable, so I can’t see what’s inside… if there’s anything!

So my next step is to pull the project, say for a deployment on another system:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ mkdir bar
lappy:tmp bsmith$ cd bar/
lappy:bar bsmith$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/bar/.git/
lappy:bar bsmith$ git pull git://github.com/benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
remote: Counting objects: 64, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (56/56), done.
remote: Total 64 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (64/64), done.
From git://github.com/benjaminleesmith/submodule_test
* branch HEAD -> FETCH_HEAD

Then… I go searching for restful auth in this latest pull…

lappy:bar bsmith$ cd vendor/plugins/
lappy:plugins bsmith$ ls
restful_authentication
lappy:plugins bsmith$ cd restful_authentication/
lappy:restful_authentication bsmith$ ls
lappy:restful_authentication bsmith$

Yikes! The directory is there, but the contents are missing! I don’t know if this is a problem with the way I added restful auth to my local git repo, or if this is an issue with github. I noticed this when a production deployment was failing saying “uninitialized constant User::Authentication (NameError)” as if restful auth was no where to be found.

It seems less than intuitive to say the least. If anyone knows what’s going on here, leave me a comment please! Otherwise, my fix was to clone restful auth, then remove its git directory. This allowed me to push to github exactly what my local copy contained.