2. Updating a Course to the Newest Template

In this guide, I’ll go through the steps of pulling the changes made to our template into your new course repo.

We will do so by merging, i.e. by treating the course repo as if it is a branch diverged from the template, and joining them together.

2.1. Preparation

Before starting, make sure your repo doesn’t contain uncommitted work. If it does, you can save them with

git stash

and then once you are done, restore them with

git stash pop

2.2. Merging

Assuming the template is already added to the remotes of your course repository, fetch the latest changes from the template and initiate the rebase process.

Tip

You can check the remotes of your repository with

git remote -v

If the template is not there, add it with

git remote add template <url>

git fetch template
git merge template/main

git will automatically try to combine all commits made since the latest common ancestor. For example, in _config.yml, if you renamed the course title from “Course template” to “Underwater Basket Weaving”, git should have no problem resolving that.

However, you may end up with some conflicts, for example if the course added a specific LaTeX macro in _config.yml and the template had a different change to the same file. However, due to the template being very bare-bones, these conflicts should be minimal and easy to resolve.

While git will instruct you on what to do, in most cases conflicts can be resolved by editing those files, and then marking them as ready with

git add {changed files}

then continuing the merge with

git commit

Be careful with the add command, don’t accidentally introduce new files. For example, if the folder contains untracked files, git stash won’t get rid of them, so if you were to do git add ., you will end up commiting them as well.

If something goes wrong, you can often abort the process with

git merge --abort

and go back to the start. But this may not work 100% of the time, so do be careful.

At the end, you’ll have a merge commit. Give it an informative message, like “Merge: Updated to latest template”.

2.3. Done

Push the changes with

git push origin main

and you should be good to go.