GitHub

According to Wikipedia:

GitHub, Inc. (/ˈɡɪthʌb/[a]) is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project.

It is located at GitHub.com and as mentioned, provides many common workflows for software development and of course the main purpose of storing version trees of software projects.

Repository

A repository is a collection of files and folders that are tracked by their changes in time using git. But they are not limited to just the source code on a single server, they can be spread across multiple servers and clients, and can be merged together at any moment to continue development in sync with the rest of the team.

It is this quality that makes git and GitHub such a powerful tool for software development. It all comes together in a shared repository on GitHub, and changes are made on the local repository on each developer's machine.

Pull Request

When a developer wants to merge their changes into the main repository, they create a pull request. This is a request to merge their changes into the main repository. And whoever is in charge of the main repository can review the changes and merge them into the main repository.

Fork

When a developer wants to make changes to a repository that they do not have access to, or does not want to disrupt the main repository, they can fork the repository. This creates a copy of the repository on their own account, and they can make changes to it without affecting the main repository. Then when they are done, they can create a pull request to merge their changes into the main repository.

Typical Workflows

Fork and Pull

This is the most common workflow for GitHub. It is used by most open source projects. It is also the default workflow for GitHub.

To start working on a project, you first fork the repository. This creates a copy of the repository on your own account. Then you clone the repository to your local machine. Then you make changes to the repository on your local machine. When you are done, you push the changes to your fork on GitHub. Then you create a pull request to merge your changes into the main repository.

When it's your own repository, you can skip the fork step and focus on branching and merging. It follows the workflow steps outlined in Git, but in the order of:

  1. Fork the repository - if necessary
  2. Clone the repository using git clone
  3. Branch the repository to make a specific change using git checkout -b
  4. Stage the changes to be committed using git add
  5. Commit the changes using git commit
  6. Pull the latest changes from the main repository using git pull to the main branch
  7. Merge the changes from the main branch into your branch using git merge
  8. Push the changes to your fork on GitHub using git push. NOTE: If not using a fork, then push the changes to the main repository using git push
  9. Create a pull request to merge your changes into the main repository.

Pages

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Tips & Tricks

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References

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