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Opening a GitHub Project
6:31Pulling GitHub projects into Android Studio is a great way to see how a project works. This video covers how to pull a GitHub project into Android Studio as well as how to fix some common errors that you might encounter.
Pushing our own projects to
GitHub is certainly useful, but
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what if we want to contribute
to an outside project?
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How can we do that from
within Android Studio?
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Luckily, Android Studio
makes this easy as well, but
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first, let's take a look at
the project we'll be contributing to.
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We are going to be making
changes to the fun facts project
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from the beginning of the Android track.
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If you're not familiar with the project,
that's okay.
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It's a fairly simple project
with only one button.
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When the button is pressed,
we randomly select a fun fact and
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a background color for the screen.
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Let's open the project on GitHub.
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It's located at
github.com/treehouse/android-fun-facts-gi-
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thub, which is in the Teacher's Notes
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along with a link to the Fun Facts course.
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Once we're here, we can click
the Fork button on the upper-right,
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to fork this project
into our own repository.
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If you're not interested in
contributing to a project,
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you can skip the forking step, and
just clone the project from the source.
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Since we'd like to contribute to this
project, we'll stick with forking.
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Once forking is finished,
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we'll want to find the clone URL
on the right side of the screen.
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Let's copy that,
as we'll need it to clone the repository.
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Now that we know what project
we're working with, and
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we've created our fork,
let's start up Android Studio.
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But this time, instead of creating or
opening an existing project,
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let's click on Check Out Project from
Version Control, and select GitHub.
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Next, if it isn't already saved, we'll
be prompted for our login information.
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Now we can paste in the clone
URL from earlier, and
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hit Test to verify it's
a valid GitHub URL.
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Then we select the Project Directory and
the name of our project,
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I'm going to pick FunFacts,
and click Clone.
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And let's click Yes to open the project.
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Awesome!
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We've successfully pulled a project from
GitHub and everything looks good to go.
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But what if it didn't work?
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How would we fix that?
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I'm going to quickly pull in an older
version of this project to show how to fix
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some common issues you might find when
checking out a project from GitHub.
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Right off the bat,
things are a bit different.
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Let's leave this as the recommended
option and click Okay.
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Android Studio then lets us know that it
will update the local.properties file
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to use our default SDK.
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This just means that the Project Creator
keeps the SDK in a different folder
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structure than we do.
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Next we can click Add Root to let
Android Studio know what's going on.
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At the top of the screen,
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there seems to be a lot of options
grayed out that shouldn't be.
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Let's sync the project with Gradle
to see if everything's all right.
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This should generally be
the first thing we try,
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because it will often help
narrow down the specific issue.
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It looks like we're targeting a version
of Android that we don't have in our SDK.
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Rather than installing
the missing platform and
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then targeting an older SDK, let's just
change our target to one we do have.
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An easy way to find out what
Gradle settings work for
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us is to inspect the Gradle
files in a recent project.
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Let's use the GitHub test project from
earlier so we can compare Gradle files.
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To get a better view of things,
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I'm going to change both projects
to the Project Perspective.
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Then, I'll drill down into the app folder,
and we'll compare build.gradle files.
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Unfortunately, our new project
doesn't seem to show the whole project
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in the Project Perspective.
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Luckily, we can find the files
we need by clicking up here.
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Looks like there
are a couple of differences.
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Let's change the compile SDK version,
build tools version,
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and target SDK version
to all be more current.
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Also, why do we have a RunProGuard
property where GitHub test has
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a minifyEnable?
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A quick Google search for RunProGuard
shows us that RunProGuard was renamed to
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MinifyEnabled in a recent Gradle update.
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Let's replace RunProGuard
with MinifyEnabled.
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Before we sync the project,
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let's quickly compare the projects
build.gradle file as well.
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Looks like we should be using
a newer version of Gradle here too.
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Let's update that.
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Now we can sync the project and
hope it all works.
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Still an error?
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This looks complicated.
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Before we dig too deep into this,
let's poke around and
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see if we can't find a file that
looks like it could be updated.
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Let's start with settings.gradle.
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Looks pretty simple, but
let's see if it's different over here.
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Nope, exactly the same.
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Hmm.
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Let's try going into the gradle folder and
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comparing the gradle
wrapper.properties files.
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Looks like there's a difference at
the end of the distribution URL property.
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Taking a closer look at the difference,
it seems to be a version number.
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Let's try updating the distribution
URL to be the more current version.
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And then we can try syncing it again.
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And there we go.
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We've successfully updated our project.
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Awesome!
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