Clone a Repository in SourceTree

I have not done much development for the last month.  This is because, in addition to being busy with other things, the repository for Diabolical on my main laptop became corrupt!  I have not had enough time to think about fixing it.  It's holiday time and despite the weather I have had some outside jobs to do including some work on my Land Rover.

I looked at the problem with SourceTree a couple of weeks ago and decided that the only way to fix the busted repository was to take a copy of my most recent changes that have not yet been pushed up, delete the old local copy of the repository and start again with a fresh download of the source.

The trouble is it's now over a Gig download so it's not a quick fix.  I also can't remember all the repository settings.  I use a quick work round for security issues and there are some very basic Getting Started answers on the support site but I decided to do some reminder screenshots to add to this article.

As long as the repository already exists on the server the process in SourceTree is easy.

Clone/New from the toolbar

Enter or select the source path

Select from the list on the server or select another server

Enter the local path to the folder to store the repository

You can select an existing empty local folder or manually add a new folder name which will be created

Press the clone button to download all the files from the repository

It may take a few minutes depending on the size of the repository and your download speed but then you will be ready to start working on your project.

Git Broke My Unity Project

I've been using Subversion (SVN) for source control for a few years but finally decided I needed to give Git a try.

For my purposes, working on my own, Subversion has served me very well.  I only decided to move because when I went to add an open source project to Codeplex it made it quite clear at every stage that SVN was not recommended and I got the feeling it was being depreciated out of existence.

It took me a while to get my head round Git and despite what the web sites claimed, I did not think that there are more choices of good Git clients than there are SVN clients.  That's just my opinion.

The Git tutorials emphasized it's de-centralised design, which for my purposes has little benefit.  I want a central master repository that holds the one version of the truth...  that's a discussion for another day.

The one command that the Git tutorials were fairly quiet about was the most important for me.  Push. After all the Add and Commit stuff is out of the way, Push uploads it to a server.  There is also the reverse Pull that I will need.

After having tried a few, the client I settled on was SourceTree.  It's written by the people who provide the BitBucket repository.  After I had used it a few times with GitHub I got to like it.  It has some handy options that make it easy for me to select the files, add them quickly and then commit and push in one easy action.

It was fairly easy to install but could do with a better getting started guide instead of some basic FAQ's.  I am not sure if it is necessary but I did need to read the instructions to create the SSH key:

I would rather not run two source control clients and I liked it enough that I have migrated my active projects.

Now for the one glitch.

All was fine to start with but then MonoDevelop v4.0.1 lost the plot!  This is the IDE launched from within Unity v4.3.  It would no longer recognise changes I made to classes, so the auto-complete functions stopped working and many sections of my code became coloured red!

The only change was that MonoDevelop had automatically recognised the Git source control and had started to use its Git Add-in.

It only took me a moment to decide that I needed to disable that.

Git add-in disabled, changes committed, Unity and Mono restarted and all was back to normal.

I am not a great fan of having everything built in to the IDE so it is no loss to me that I have had to disable the add-in.  I didn't even notice it was there until it went wrong.

Now I can get on and migrate more of my projects to Git repositories.