Summary
GitHub allows you to back up your repositories online and collaborate with other developers.
Details
Using Git allows you to create snapshots of your project and back up your code locally. This allows you to go back to previous versions of your project if necessary. However, if something happens to your computer and your project gets erased, then you will likely lose your local backups. This is where GitHub comes in.
Backup
GitHub is a website that allows you to back up your local repositories online. Now if something happens to your computer and your project gets erased, you can simply download or clone the project from GitHub onto a new computer and continue working.
Collaborate
GitHub also allows you to easily collaborate with other developers. Since your repo is now online, you can add other developers as collaborators, which means they can download or clone your project and work on it. Each developer can work on different branches to avoid interfering with the other developers’ work. Instead of merging branches locally, the work can be merged into the main or master branch on GitHub using a feature called pull requests. The pull request allows other developers to review and test your work before merging it into the main or master branch. This helps avoid problems on the main or master branch.
There are other services that are similar to GitHub, like BitBucket and GitLab.
Exercises
The GitHub exercises to go along with these tutorials are included in our Git exercises repository on GitHub. You don’t have to know how to use GitHub to use them. Just click the green Code button in the corner and click the Download ZIP option. Then unzip the folder and open it in your text editor.
If you’ve already downloaded the Git exercises repository before for the Git Basics section, you can continue working on it.
Each module has a folder. Inside each module folder is a folder for each lesson. The lesson folders usually contain files already where you can put your code, although occassionally you will be asked to create files on your own.
NOTE: You can ignore the instructions included in the folders. The instructions are now listed directly in the lessons.
References
No references available.