Git is an excellent,
and industry-recognized
version-control system.
GitHub.com, the website,
makes that accessible to everyone.
♪ (whimsical theme music throughout) ♪
It's easy to think that you could
host your Git repositories anywhere.
There's plenty of services,
and plenty of tools for you to host them,
even within your own corporate firewall.
But there's more than
just hosting your code.
We're talking about changing software,
and that includes all types,
and all facets of collaboration:
filing issues, organizing repositories
so they're easy to find,
being able to mention
the contributors by user name,
and the ability to have control
over the inbound changes
through the concept
that we call pull requests.
All of these are facilitated
by GitHub.com,
a collaboration platform
that also hosts Git repositories.
Your first interaction with GitHub
is likely through the Explore page,
finding a bit of open source
that solves a need
in your current application.
But soon you'll find
you want to file an issue,
or perhaps even
submit a change to a project
that improves it, or corrects a defect.
Those are all things
that are made possible
by the GitHub platform.
You'll find that we have solutions,
such as an integrated defect tracker,
and the process of pull requests,
to which code change can get reviewed,
commented on, refined,
and then finally accepted,
even for people
that are not core contributors
to the project itself.
GitHub adds further innovations
that allow Git to go places
that it wouldn't ordinarily
have been welcome.
For example, we have an SvnBridge
that allows any Git repository
to be treated as a subversion repository.
This often facilitates a slow migration
of continuous integration infrastructure,
build scripts, or other automation
that you've built into
your release process.
GitHub also has the concept
of the web flow.
This brings most of the GitHub operations
to the web browser.
No cloning the repository to disk,
no loading of Git software
on your local machine,
especially if it's a shared terminal,
just an editor, with syntax highlighting,
directly in the browser,
for any of the files in a repository.
Rename them, move them,
delete them, add brand new files,
change all kinds of things
about the project,
directly from the browser.
This means that Git is far more accessible
to the members of your organization,
open source project,
or company, than would be if
they required the desktop tools
to interact with this repository.
As documentation is recognized
to be a critical part
of every software project,
having support for Prose,
both in the repositories
and in the surrounding commentary,
is extremely important.
GitHub supports GitHub-flavored markdown,
which is an improvement
on the core markdown language
in issues, pull requests,
and even in documents
that are contributed to
the core of the repository itself.
Simply give them a .md extension,
put them in the repository
as you would any other file,
and you'll see them
rendered, with changes,
as you would expect
from a document editor.
Lines are struck out that are removed,
lines appropriately show
where they've been relocated to,
and lines that are put in as additions
are shown in green.
It doesn't end with just
code and documents, though.
We're adding support for things like
3D models, an STL file format,
and GeoJSON, for maps.
Those render in the browser,
meaning that tools you'd ordinarily
have to purchase and download
to your local machine,
complexly set up, configure and install,
now just render directly in the browser,
making those files all the more accessible
for anyone visiting that repository.
GitHub is the unifying platform
that brings together a web flow
that would ordinarily
require desktop tools,
both for working with Git,
as well as rendering these complex
markdown, STL, and GeoJSON files
into an online experience
that's easy to use,
just moments after signing up
for an account.
It means that collaboration
happens more frequently,
with less friction,
and more contributions get made
to both open-
and closed-source projects
because of this product.
Thanks for watching this episode
of Git and GitHub Foundations
on the GitHub.com platform.
Be sure to subscribe
to our episodes over here.
If you have a followup question,
ask that down below.
We also appreciate comments.
And if you'd like some related videos,
those are all right down here,
including the use of pull requests.