GitHub
GitHub is the de-facto centralized store for anything related to code, based upon Git. Not just that, it is an essential tool in collaboration, project management and deployment workflows.

GitHub (https://github.com) is a website that hosts code, and lets you collaborate on Open Source projects, host your own public and private repositories.

It’s a place where millions of developers gather every day to collaborate on open source software. It’s also the place that hosts billions of lines of code, and also a place where users of software go to report issues they might have.

In short, it’s a platform for software developers, and it’s built around Git.

It’s especially important to know the difference between Git and GitHub.

Git exists without GitHub.

GitHub is built on top of Git.

It makes collaboration on projects much easier.

And it gives you the ability to have discussions around projects, issue tracking, and a lot more.

One thing you’ll see later is how GitHub is central in the deployment phase, where we’ll connect to GitHub and we’ll fetch the code we want to deploy.

As a developer you can’t avoid using GitHub daily, either to host your code or to make use of other people’s code. This post explains you some key concepts of GitHub, and how to use some of its features that improve your workflow, and how to integrate other applications into your process.

Why GitHub

Now that you know what GitHub is, you might ask why you should use it.

GitHub after all is managed by a private company, which profits from hosting people’s code. So why should you use that instead of similar platforms such as BitBucket or GitLab, which are very similar?

Beside personal preferences, and technical reasons, there is one big reason: everyone uses GitHub, so the network effect is huge.

Major codebases migrated over time to Git from other version control systems, because of its convenience, and GitHub was historically well positioned into (and put a lot of effort to “win”) the Open Source community.

So today any time you look up some library, you will 99% of the times find it on GitHub.

Apart from Open Source code, many developers also host private repositories on GitHub because of the convenience of a unique platform.

Lessons in this unit:

0: ▶︎ Introduction
1: GitHub issues
2: Social coding
3: Pull requests
4: Project management
5: Comparing changes
6: Webhooks and integrations
7: What happens after pushing
8: DEMO Create a GitHub account
9: DEMO Using GitHub desktop
10: DEMO Using Git in VS Code
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