Intro to GitHub • GitHub & Git Foundations

Git is an excellent,
and industry-recognized

version-control system.

GitHub.com, the website,
makes that accessible to everyone.

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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 Git 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.