Integrate github to SAS Studio

[jainruthvik]

We are getting started with SAS Viya, Can I integrate Github with SAS Studio on Viya similar to SAS EG?

What are the best practices for maintaining code on SAS Viya?

[alexal]

@jainruthvik,

That is possible in SAS Studio 3, please see SAS® Studio 3.71: Developer’s Guide to Repositories. I'm not sure about SAS Studio version 4 and 5 which ships with SAS Viya 3.4, I will find out and post the answer later.

[jainruthvik]

Thank you that is very helpful. We have SAS Studio 5, please do share if you find the link for developer's guide .

[alexal]

@jainruthvik,

That feature isn't available in SAS Viya 3.4. 

[AmyP_sas]

We are working on adding integration with Git into SAS Studio.  The plan is to create something more robust than what's currently offered in SAS Enterprise Guide - that is, allow connections to remote (rather than just local) repositories.  This functionality will likely show up first in a 9.4 release (current projection is for a Studio 3.8 to deliver it with 9.4M6 late in 2018) then will be rolled into a Studio 5.x release that Viya products can consume in 2019.  The Git integration we're working on is based on using operating system files at first.  We're still working on what kind of integration is needed with SAS Content that's managed in SAS Drive (what SAS Studio 5.1 on Viya accesses now).  Please post your use cases as that will help us drive the requirements.

[jainruthvik]

Amy, I was using Python before making the transition to SAS . We were making use of github/python for analytics team.

Some of the work was shared within the team, so Github was very helpful to track the code changes and have a code history.

In my current company we have a medium sized Analytics team, I want to start using SAS with Github to save a copy of code changes.

We have a lot of code and we are migrating to SAS Viya, so github would be very helpful. I would be very happy if SAS can integrate Github very similar to any Open source ide like Jupiter.

[HernanM]

There are two use cases from my point of view:
1. The ability to protect code by forking. A colleague wanted to copy some of my code, deleted the other parts, and clicked Save instead of Save As. So a large portion of my program was lost. If we had been using Github, the colleague could have forked my project, and my original code would have been intact.
2. The ability to keep track of changes. When one commits changes, Git allows putting comments about why a change was made, and tracks when the change was made.

[Edoedoedo]

Amy, it is truly necessary to improve SAS Studio V to make it look like the state-of-the-art IDEs, like Visual Studio Code. It lacks of so many features, Git integration included: the use cases are all the standard git use cases to develop code among a wide group of programmers, like keeping track of who edit what and when, to roll back to a previous commit, branching to test new things, pull/push code from a corporate repository to let user to have any local copy but one and only one official version of the code, and many many. Nowadays, it's very difficult to work with a medium sized team with SAS Studio V: everyone writes on "/SASContent", everyone can edit others code and saving the content is overwritten forever, I myself deleted an official code by mistake and it was just gone.

Of course one can restrict access to some folder, make backups, but that's not the point because it is difficult to "make and maintain" order. With Git you don't need to worry about any of these things "by design", and I believe it is a MUST to work on in order to keep up the pace with all the open source products.

Edit: or perhaps you should drop Sas Studio entirely, and work on a plugin to integrate Viya on the already existing IDEs like VSC!