About Git and GitHub

What is Git and GitHub?

GitHub is an online software development platform that does version control and promotes code-sharing and collaboration. Git is an open-source version control software on which GitHub sits. It is used for managing and tracking file revisions.

What is version control?

• A system that manages changes to files over time.
• Benefits include collaborating and versioning.

What is Git and GitHub used for?

• GitHub Pages: a free web server for simple static websites. You don’t need web-development skills to do basic sites, only markup. If you want something fancier, you can use web-development.
  • Professional websites;
  • Miscellaneous website (like this website!);
  • Prototypes.
• Sharing documents or other assets (fonts, images, powerpoints)
• Sharing code (Python, R, Drupal modules)

Workshop outline

In this workshop we will be doing a few basic actions in Git and GitHub. We will start be doing these actions in the GitHub user interface. After a brief introduction to the command line, we will do the same actions again using Git (and the command line). Finally, we will be synching our local Git repository and the one on GitHub.