In this section, you’ll get some introductory experience creating a GitHub repository and populating it with files from the web interface.
GitHub
GitHub is a remote, cloud service designed for collaborative code development, change tracking, and version control.
GitHub is built on top of Git, which is the tool responsible for version control. Git is the version control software you install locally on your own computer to track your own projects. GitHub is a cloud service that allows users to collaborate on projects while keeping a log of each person’s changes (or “commits”). You can also create projects directly on GitHub using a browser (without installing Git). While you won’t be able to do advanced version control using GitHub alone, GitHub allows you to work with projects without using the command line.
First, you will be setting up a new project on GitHub by creating a new repository. The repository is where all the folders and files, including any images or media, for your project will go. The repository is also a way for others to view the “raw” content of your website and for collaborators to contribute to a shared repository. By default, GitHub will track changes to materials that are stored in a repository.
Check out the Research Commons’ GitHub repositories: each repository contains the related files and media for one project, including a repository for this workshop.
GitHub Pages is the related feature that will knit your repository into a functioning website. “GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files straight from a repository on GitHub, optionally runs the files through a build process, and publishes a website.” It is part of GitHub, and we will show you how to turn on the GitHub Pages feature in the settings of your repository.