GITHUB / LESSON 02
What is GitHub?
Git hosting and collaboration platform
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GITHUB / LESSON 02
Git hosting and collaboration platform
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Last lesson you learned that Git saves snapshots of your work right on your computer. Great. Now what happens when that computer croaks? Or when you want to share your code with somebody else?
That's where GitHub comes in. GitHub is a website that stores your Git projects online, so they're safe and easy to share.
Think of GitHub like Google Drive or Dropbox, except it's built specifically for code projects.
| Google Drive | GitHub |
|---|---|
| Store documents | Store code |
| Share files with others | Share projects with others |
| Access from any computer | Access from any computer |
| See previous versions | See complete project history |
If your computer dies tomorrow, your code is sitting safe on GitHub. Download it to a new computer and keep right on working.
Started a project at home? Pick it back up at school or at work. Your code lives in the cloud.
GitHub makes it simple for a bunch of people to work on the same project.
GitHub is the biggest home for code on the internet, and a huge number of companies and open source projects run on it. When you learn it, you're learning a skill developers use all over the world.
When you open a project on GitHub, here's what you'll find.
All the files in the project, organized in folders. You can click through them right in your web browser.
A document that explains what the project does. Think of it as the project's front page.
A list of every change ever made. You can see who changed what and when (yes, it's a lil bit of a paper trail).
A spot to report bugs or suggest new features. Basically a to-do list for the project.
Proposed changes that are waiting to be reviewed. We'll get into these later.
On GitHub a project is called a "repository" (or "repo" for short). Repositories come in two flavors.
Public
Private
Here's the part people don't expect... GitHub is more than storage. It's also kind of a social network for developers.
Plenty of developers treat their GitHub profile like a portfolio to show off what they've built.
Let's say you're building a personal website. It'd go something like this.
Now you know what GitHub is, so it's time to set up your own account. Next lesson we'll create your GitHub account and set up SSH keys so your computer can connect to GitHub securely...