A Mac guide for setting up your environment for writing and publishing reStructuredText documentation to GitHub easily. Here you will be setting up Git, creating and connecting a GitHub account, installing Atom editor and installing Git-Plus package for Git commands without terminal.
Head over to the Atom website and click the download button on the front page. Once downloaded open the .zip file and it should un-pack itself. Once un-packed, you can open Atom and use it.
Head over to the GitHub join page and make a Free account. If you choose to you could go through the steps of checking, generating, and adding an SSH key to GitHub so that Atom will not prompt for credentials every time you push to GitHub. This is not necessary by any means but it does make workflow a lot faster.
Git usually comes pre-installed on most Mac machines. The way you can check is by typing in your Terminal:
$ git --version
It should return a result like:
$ git --version
git version 2.5.4 (Apple Git-61)
If you get a result then head to the next step. If you get an error or nothing happens then it isn't installed and you can head to the Git Getting-Started Guide and follow the instructions to download/install Git.
The Git-Plus package uses git's config file to get your GitHub info so it can add, commit and push your files to GitHub. So once Git is working open your Terminal and type:
$ atom ~/.gitconfig
This should open a file in Atom called .gitconfig. Within this file add the following to the bottom:
[user]
name = UserName
email = example@example.com
Replacing UserName with your GitHub Username and example@example.com with your GitHub email address. If this stuff already exists just make sure it matches your GitHub info.
You're almost there! The last step is to install the Git-Plus package so that you can do everything git from Atom itself. HOW COOL IS THAT? 😎 So open Atom and in the top menu bar go to Atom > Preferences. A new tab should open with a Settings page. Here you can click the Install button and in the text field type git-plus. Press the Package button on the right and the first result should be by the author akonwi, on this package click the blue install button and the package should install. Once finished you can close that tab, open a new blank tab and press command+shift+H. If this doesn't pull up a command window at the top then the package didn't install properly and you should uninstall and reinstall.
Head over to the next guide where I'll show you how to use all of these things together to make your documentation workflow easier and faster!