The goal of this course is to give you a brief introduction to GitHub. We’ll also provide you with materials for further learning and a few ideas to get you started on our platform. 🚀
Git and GitHubGit is a distributed Version Control System (VCS), which means it is a useful tool for easily tracking changes to your code, collaborating, and sharing. With Git you can track the changes you make to your project so you always have a record of what you’ve worked on and can easily revert back to an older version if need be. It also makes working with others easier—groups of people can work together on the same project and merge their changes into one final source!
GitHub is a way to use the same power of Git all online with an easy-to-use interface. It’s used across the software world and beyond to collaborate and maintain the history of projects.
GitHub is home to some of the most advanced technologies in the world. Whether you're visualizing data or building a new game, there's a whole community and set of tools on GitHub that can get you to the next step. This course starts with the basics of GitHub, but we'll dig into the rest later.
The GitHub flow is a lightweight workflow that allows you to experiment and collaborate on your projects easily, without the risk of losing your previous work.
A repository is where your project work happens--think of it as your project folder. It contains all of your project’s files and revision history. You can work within a repository alone or invite others to collaborate with you on those files.
When a repository is created with GitHub, it’s stored remotely in the ☁️. You can clone a repository to create a local copy on your computer and then use Git to sync the two. This makes it easier to fix issues, add or remove files, and push larger commits. You can also use the editing tool of your choice as opposed to the GitHub UI. Cloning a repository also pulls down all the repository data that GitHub has at that point in time, including all versions of every file and folder for the project! This can be helpful if you experiment with your project and then realize you liked a previous version more. To learn more about cloning, read "Cloning a Repository".
Committing and pushing are how you can add the changes you made on your local machine to the remote repository in GitHub. That way your instructor and/or teammates can see your latest work when you’re ready to share it. You can make a commit when you have made changes to your project that you want to “checkpoint.” You can also add a helpful commit message to remind yourself or your teammates what work you did (e.g. “Added a README with information about our project”).
Once you have a commit or multiple commits that you’re ready to add to your repository, you can use the push command to add those changes to your remote repository. Committing and pushing may feel new at first, but we promise you’ll get used to it 🙂
We mentioned repositories already, they are where your project work happens, but let’s talk a bit more about the details of them! As you work more on GitHub you will have many repositories which may feel confusing at first. Fortunately, your "GitHub dashboard" helps to easily navigate to your repositories and see useful information about them. Make sure you’re logged in to see it!
Repositories also contain READMEs. You can add a README file to your repository to tell other people why your project is useful, what they can do with your project, and how they can use it. We are using this README to communicate how to learn Git and GitHub with you. 😄 To learn more about repositories read "Creating, Cloning, and Archiving Repositories and "About README's".
Your profile page tells people the story of your work through the repositories you're interested in, the contributions you've made, and the conversations you've had. You can also give the world a unique view into who you are with your profile README. You can use your profile to let future employers know all about you! To learn more about your user profile and adding and updating your profile README, read "Managing Your Profile README".