Hello everyone, I'm Rutik, today I'm going to tell you What Is GitHub, And What Is It Used For? If you like this information, please share it with your friends.
GitHub is a platform that’s been very popular with the coding community recently. It’s an open-source code hosting site that helps developers store and manage their code. As a company, GitHub Inc. has existed since 2008 and has raised millions in investments to this day. But what exactly does it do that makes it so popular?
What Is Git?
As the name suggests, the version control system upon which GitHub is based is Git. Git is an open-source system created by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, back in 2005. Back then, it began as a command-line tool in the Linux kernel.
More specifically, Git is a distributed version control system. It manages software versions just like other version control systems, using a central repository. The difference is that Git, as a distributed system, makes the repository available on every developer’s computer. This means that developers who use distributed version control actually retain a copy of the central repository by cloning it to their own machine.
This system works in a way that lets developers change their own local copies first, and after that, they register these changes to the central server. This procedure makes it easier to work with more detailed changes, because each time a developer wants to enact a change, it isn’t necessary to establish a connection to the server in order to do so.
What Is Version Control?
The class of systems that helps software developers track and manage changes to computer programs, websites, documents, or other data, is known as version control.
Developers constantly make improvements and changes to a software’s code after creating it. With every update, they come up with a new version of the software’s first officially released code.
The job of version control systems is to maintain these version updates by saving the changes in a central repository, that is, a location where all the files for a particular project are stored. This process makes it easier for developers to work together on the versions. They can download versions from the repository, change them, and re-upload the new version they’ve created. To keep track, these changes stored in the repository can be accessed by other developers at any point.
What Is GitHub?
GitHub is a business that provides hosting for Git repositories. It is a service for source code management and version control based on cloud computing. It also comes with code review features such as pull and review requests, project and team management, documentation, integrations with other developer tools, and much more.
GitHub provides its users with an interface that makes working with Git much easier. This brings Git closer to developers who are still learning the ropes, as using Git without GitHub is usually reserved for more experienced coders. The Git command line still does the job, but GitHub’s client is much easier to use as a replacement for it, or as an addition.
GitHub’s user-friendliness has actually inspired users from different backgrounds to work on it for a variety of projects such as book writing, managing documents, and more. It’s mostly popular in the open-source community, but as we said, creating a GitHub account is easy and available to anyone who wishes to host a public code repository free of charge.
In order to remain profitable, GitHub sells hosted private code repositories and on-premise instances of its software to various companies. The term “social coding” is sometimes used to describe what GitHub does.
It provides an open platform for developers that lets them share and work together on open-source code, enables them to find the code they can make use of easily, retain a copy of the repository for their personal needs, and modify projects others have been working on as well.
Let’s go over a few of the main reasons that geeks like to use GitHub, and learn some terminology along the way.
- Repository
A repository is a location where all the files for a particular project are stored. Each project has its own repo, and you can access it with a unique URL.
- Forking a Repo
Forking is when you create a new project based on another project that already exists. This is an amazing feature that vastly encourages the further development of programs and other projects. If you find a project on GitHub that you’d like to contribute to, you can fork the repo, make the changes you’d like, and release the revised project as a new repo. If the original repository that you forked to create your new project gets updated, you can easily add those updates to your current fork.
- Pull Requests
You’ve forked a repository, made a great revision to the project, and want it to be recognized by the original developers maybe even included in the official project/repository. You can do so by creating a pull request. The authors of the original repository can see your work, and then choose whether or not to accept it into the official project. Whenever you issue a pull request, GitHub provides a perfect medium for you and the main project’s maintainer to communicate.
- Social networking
The social networking aspect of GitHub is probably its most powerful feature, allowing projects to grow more than just about any of the other features offered. Each user on GitHub has their own profile that acts as a resume of sorts, showing your past work and contributions to other projects via pull requests.
Project revisions can be discussed publicly, so a mass of experts can contribute knowledge and collaborate to advance a project forward. Before the advent of GitHub, developers interested in contributing to a project would usually need to find some means of contacting the authors probably by email, and then convince them that they can be trusted and their contribution is legit.
- Changelogs
When multiple people collaborate on a project, it’s hard to keep track of revisions who changed what, when, and where those files are stored. GitHub takes care of this problem by keeping track of all the changes that have been pushed to the repository.
GitHub Isn’t Just for Developers
All this talk about how GitHub is ideal for programmers may have you believing that they are the only ones who will find it useful. Although it’s a lot less common, you can actually use GitHub for any type of file. If you have a team that is constantly making changes to a word document, for example, you could use GitHub as your version control system. This practice isn’t common, since there are better alternatives in most cases, but it’s something to keep in mind.
We hope this post helped you understand what GitHub is and how you can make good use of it! Whether you're an experienced developer or just want to experiment with building something for the first time, we highly recommend incorporating version control into your workflow with GitHub.
Now that you know what GitHub is all about, are you ready to get started? Head over to GitHub.com and be sure to check out their help pages after signing up.
There is no expert who can remain an expert without sharing their knowledge. So, keep sharing your knowledge with everyone.