61B Assignment Workflow

Author: Ethan Ordentlich

This guide describes how to set up an assignment in CS 61B.

Here is a video demo of this guide:

If you get some sort of error, stop and either figure it out by carefully reading the Git WTFs or seek help at office hours or on Ed. You’ll potentially save yourself a lot of trouble vs. guess-and-check with git commands. If you find yourself trying to use commands recommended by Google like force push, don’t run them, even if a post you found on Stack Overflow says to do it!

Getting the Skeleton

The skeleton remote repository contains the skeleton code for all assignments. Whenever a new assignment is released, or if we need to update an assignment, you will pull from the skeleton. First use cd to navigate to your fa25-s12345 repository directory, then run:

git pull skeleton main

This fetches all remote files from the repo named skeleton (which is located at https://github.com/Berkeley-CS61B/skeleton-fa25.git) and copies them into your current folder.

If you get an error similar to fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories, you can fix this each time by using

git pull --no-rebase --allow-unrelated-histories skeleton main

Opening in IntelliJ

The following instructions apply for every assignment. For every assignment, after pulling from skeleton to get new lab or project files, you will need to run through the following steps again.

1. Start up IntelliJ. If you have no projects open, click the “Open” button. If you have a project currently open, navigate to “File –> Open”.

2. Find and choose the directory of your current assignment. For example, for Homework 1, you would select the hw01 directory inside your fa25-s12345 repo.

   Make sure that you open only the assignment folder, and not the entire fa25-s12345 repo.

   

3. Navigate to the “File -> Project Structure” menu, and make sure you are in the Project tab. Set your project SDK to your installed Java version. If 21 or higher isn’t available in the dropdown, make sure you downloaded and installed Java completely.

4. Still in the Project tab, set the Project Language Level to “SDK default”.

   At this point, the Project tab should look something like this:

   

   • The SDK is set to Java 21 or higher.
   • The Language level is “SDK default.”
   • The Compiler output is filled in, and is set to the assignment directory, followed by out

5. Still in Project Structure, go to the Libraries tab. Click the “+ -> Java” button, then navigate to library-fa25, select the folder, and click “Ok”.

   

   

   

6. Click “Ok” to apply your settings and leave Project Structure.

At this point, if things have been configured correctly:

• Each Java file should have a blue circle next to its name.
• When you open any file, none of the code should be highlighted in red.

Submitting to Gradescope

1. Use cd to navigate to your repository, and add your assignment directory using git add.

   For example, for Homework 1, you can use cd to navigate to fa25-s12345, then run git add hw01.

   Or, you could use cd to navigate to fa25-s12345/hw01, and then run git add . (where . is shorthand for “the current folder”).

2. Commit the files using git commit -m "<commit message here>". The commit message is required.

   For example, git commit -m "Finished Homework 1".

3. Push your code to your remote repository with git push origin main.

4. Open the assignment on Gradescope. Select Github, then your fa25-s12345 repository and the main branch, then submit your assignment. You will receive a confirmation email, and the autograder will run automatically.

   

   If Gradescope doesn’t let you choose the correct repository/branch, try unlinking and relinking your GitHub account.

Gradescope will use the latest version of your code from Github. If you think that Gradescope isn’t grading the right code, check that you have added, committed, and pushed by running git status.

If you’ve gotten yourself into a situation where you’re unable to push for some reason, see Git WTFS.