Contribute to this lesson

Learning Objectives

• Reporting a mistake

• How to look at the source of these lessons

• How to modify a lesson

These lessons are not really about software, they are about people. If you have followed along until this point you are more than qualified to edit the lessons. There are probably several mistakes in these lessons, or they will be outdated soon. Keeping the lessons working and fixing all mistakes is a monumental task for one single person.

We need you! You now know everything you need to in order to contribute. Take advantage of this.

The source of this lesson is hosted on GitHub: lhcb/starterkit-lessons.

Submitting a bug report

If you spot something that is wrong, create a bug report on the issue tracker This is super simple and makes it easy for everyone to keep track of what is broken and needs fixing. It also increases your chances of someone posting a solution.

You do not need anyone’s permission to start making changes. You can start directly. If you want to edit something the first thing to do is to create a fork of the repository. Visit lhcb/first-analysis-steps and click the “Fork” button at the top right.

A fork is simply a copy of the original repository. It works just as well as the original. Clone the repository to your computer to start making changes:

$ git clone https://YOURUSERNAME@github.com/YOURUSERNAME/starterkit-lessons.git

As you can see each lesson has its own .md file. The source of this lesson available by clicking the link on the upper right of this page. It is a simple text file with a few clever lines with special meaning.

The format the files are written in is called Markdown. It is a very simple language, which adds some basic formatting to text files. **Bold text** leads to Bold text, _Italic_ is italic and [the search engine](https://www.google.com) makes a link to the search engine.

Trying it out live

Try out Markdown live in your browser with Dillinger.

If you want to see what your changes look like, simply paste a lesson to Dillinger.

If you found something to improve, create a new branch with a fitting name (replace fixing-typos):

$ git checkout -b fixing-typos

Once you are done with your changes, commit them. To commit use git add 00-lesson-you-edited.md and then git commit. After git push’ing it, visit your copy of the repository on github: https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/starterkit-lessons.

In order to test your changes, you can run the starterkit website locally. To do so, first install the required python packages. This can be done by passing the requirements.txt that is present in the git repository to pip

pip install -r requirements.txt --user

Besides these packages you need to install pandoc on your system. Once all requirements are satisfied, run

make preview
cd _site
python -m http.server

in the top level of the git repository.

This will start a webserver on your computer. Then open you web browser and navigate to

localhost:8000

to see the website.

Next you want to create a pull request. The GitHub documentation is excellent, so we will not duplicate it here. Simply follow the guide: how to create a pull request.

Now we can see your proposed changes and will probably leave you some comments. Once everyone is happy, one of the main starterkit’ers will merge your pull request. Congratulations, you have successfully contributed!