What is GitHub for?

Github is a website and service that provides GIT free and paid and has interface for WEB management, without having to install a GIT client.

To understand Github you need to understand the service they provide , and in this case the service is Git .

Git is a distributed version control system and a source code management system, they are like "protocols" to work with repositories, similar to SVN.

Software development contains many steps and you often need to have a history of what you've done and even be able to roll back.

And to manage a git you'll need a client for this, we usually use git via the command line, which can be found at:

• link

But to facilitate there are those with graphic interface:

• link
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Among many others at: link

Think you have a big project and something started to fail in the last modification, you can look at code by code until you find out where it failed, or simply look at the last history of Git and see exactly what you changed through < em> diff

Another goal of using Git is to work with multiple programmers, you will be able to merge modifications to manage the branchs and know exactly what the other did, remotely as well.

Of course many developers out there work with Git in a way that can be tricky, since generally everyone is in absolute control over the master, so all commits are mixed up, and by leaps and bounds people are using Git, when it would often be ideal to have someone who is the primary controller, one who approves and compares things, but that is something broader to speak and / or explain.

Github and open-source

The @jefferson reminded me of one detail, although it may not be with the question, it is interesting to say that Github is quite popular due to the open-source projects and the link with other tools / services like:

• packagist for composer
• MyGet (can integrate github with nuget, npm, etc.)

There are many software that we use today, such as Angular, Vue, jQuery, Laravel, etc that are versioned in Github, ie the source is there and the modifications, corrections, historical and some distributions in the Release tab) are also made by Github.

Github is not the only one that provides GIT

Github is not the only site that provides free GIT, example also:

• Gitlab - Note: has unlimited private repositories
• Bitbucket - Note: has unlimited private repositories, but only allows 5 users
• sourceforge - Note: provides Git, SVN, Mercurial and Bazaar

In addition to the GIT versioning system there are others like:

• SVN
• mercurial
• Bazaar

To understand the importance of GitHub, you need to understand the Importance of a version control system .

  

version control is a system that records changes made to a file or set of files over time so that you can recover specific versions.

Do not attach the concept of version control to source code. It is very useful among programmers, however I could write a poem or create a graphic art with the help of a version control system.

GitHub is a web hosting code platform (or anything else, like poems) that uses Git as a version control system.

The great importance of GitHub is the open source and the contribution. There you can host your project controlled by Git and several people can contribute to your project. Some notorious projects that follow this model:

• Microsoft code editor, the Visual Studio Code
• the kernel Linux
• own Git
• the Ruby language and the Rails framework

GitHub re-engineered what we know about contribution and open source today with the web template and using Git.

• Git - A Short History of Git

Learning Git before learning GitHub is essential. But how to learn GitHub? GitHub has some workflows besides Git. The concepts of pull requests, code reviews, issues and others are unique to GitHub and go beyond Git.