Introduction to GitHub
GitHub is the largest open-source community in the world. Microsoft owns GitHub. GitHub is a development platform inspired by the way you work.
You can host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 40 million developers from open source to business.
GitHub is a Git repository hosting service that adds many of its features.
While Git is a command-line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface.
It also provides access control and several collaboration features, such as wikis and essential task management tools for every project.
So what are the main benefits of using GitHub? Nearly every open-source project uses GitHub to manage its project.
Using GitHub is free if your project is open source and includes a wiki and issue tracker, making it easy to have more in-depth documentation and get feedback about your project.
What are some of the features offered by GitHub?
Automate from code to cloud: Cycle your production code faster and simplify your workflow with GitHub Packages and built-in CI/CD using GitHub Actions.
- Automate your workflows: Build, test, deploy, and run CI/CD how you want in the same place you manage code. Trigger Actions from any GitHub event to any available API. Build your Actions in the language of your choice, or choose from thousands of workflows and Actions created by the community.
- Packages at home with their code: Use Actions to automatically publish new package versions to GitHub Packages. Install packages and images hosted on GitHub Packages or your preferred packages registry in your CI/CD workflows. It is always free for open source, and data transfer within Actions is unlimited for everyone.
Securing software together: GitHub plays a role in securing the world's code—developers, maintainers, researchers, and security teams. On GitHub, development teams everywhere can work together to secure the world's software supply chain, from fork to finish.
- Get alerts about vulnerabilities in your code: GitHub continuously scans security advisories for popular languages. Also, it sends security alerts to maintainers of affected repositories with details so they can remediate risks.
- Automatically update vulnerabilities: GitHub monitors your project dependencies and automatically opens pull requests to update dependencies to the minimum version that resolves known vulnerabilities.
- Stay on top of CVEs: Stay updated with the latest Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), and learn how they affect you with the GitHub Advisory Database.
- Find vulnerabilities that other tools miss: CodeQL is the industry's leading semantic code analysis engine. GitHub's revolutionary approach treats code as data to identify security vulnerabilities faster.
- Eliminate variants: Never make the same mistake twice. Proactive vulnerability scanning prevents vulnerabilities from ever reaching production.
- Keep your tokens safe: Accidentally commit a token to a public repository? GitHub got you. With support from 20 service providers, GitHub takes steps to keep you safe.
Seamless code review: Code review is the surest path to better code and is fundamental to how GitHub works. Built-in review tools make code review an essential part of your team's process.
- Propose changes: Better code starts with a Pull Request, a living conversation about changes where you can talk through ideas, assign tasks, discuss details, and conduct reviews.
- Request reviews: If you are on the other side of a review, you can request reviews from your peers to get the detailed feedback you need.
- See the difference: Reviews happen faster when you know exactly what changes. Diffs compare versions of your source code, highlighting the new, edited, or deleted parts.
- Comment in context: Discussions happen in comment threads within your code—bundle comments into one review or reply to someone else who is in line to start a conversation.
- Give clear feedback: Your teammates should not have to think too hard about what a thumbs-up emoji means. Specify whether your comments are required changes or just a few suggestions.
- Protect branches: Only merge the highest-quality code. You can configure repositories to require status checks, reducing human error and administrative overhead.
All your code and documentation in one place: Hundreds of millions of private, public, and open-source repositories are hosted on GitHub. Every repository has tools to help you host, version, and release code and documentation.
- Code where you collaborate: Repositories keep code in one place and help your teams collaborate with the tools they love, even if you work with large files using Git LFS. You can create or import as many projects as possible with unlimited private repositories for individuals and groups.
- Documentation alongside your code: Host your documentation directly from your repositories with GitHub Pages. Use Jekyll as a static site generator and publish your Pages from the /docs folder on your main branch.
Manage your ideas: Coordinate early, stay aligned, and get more done with GitHub's project management tools.
- See your project's large picture: See everything happening in your project and choose where to focus your team's efforts with Projects and task boards that live right where they belong: close to your code.
- Track and assign tasks: Issues help you identify, assign, and keep track of tasks within your team. You can open an Issue to track a bug, discuss an idea with an @mention, or start distributing work.
The human side of software: Building software is more about managing teams and communities than coding. Whether on a group of two or 2000, GitHub has the support your people need.
- Manage and grow teams: Help people organize with GitHub teams, level up to access administrative roles, and fine-tune your permissions with nested teams.
- Keep conversations: Moderation tools, like issue and pull request locking, help your team stay focused on code. And if you maintain an open-source project, user blocking reduces noise and ensures productive conversations.
- Set community guidelines: Set roles and expectations without starting from scratch. Customize standard codes of conduct to create the perfect one for your project. Then choose a pre-written license right from your repository.
GitHub offers excellent learning resources for its platform. You can find everything from git introduction training to deep dive on publishing static pages to GitHub and how to do DevOps on GitHub right here.