GitHub is a cloud-based service that helps developers store and manage their code. To understand GitHub fully, you need to understand Version Control and Git
What Is Version Control?
Version control helps developers manage and keep track of changes to a software project’s code. As a software project grows, version control becomes essential.
If a developer is to work on a specific part of a software project’s codebase, it wouldn’t be safe to have them directly edit the source code.
Instead, version control allows developers work safely through branching. With branching, a developer duplicates part of the source code, which is called the repository. The developer can then safely make changes to that part of the code without affecting the rest of the project.
All of these changes are tracked and can be reverted if the need arises.
What Is Git?
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system, which means that the entire codebase and history is available to every developer, allowing for easy branching.
GitHub is a Git repository hosting service. It offers the distributed version control and source code management(SCM) functionality of Git. While Git is a command line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface. Github also provides access control and several collaboration features, such as a bug tracking, wikis and basic task management tools for every project.
One of the most important features of GitHub is “forking” which is copying a repository from one user’s account to another. This lets you take a project that you don’t have write access to and modify it under your own account. After making changes, you can send a notification called a “pull request” to the original owner. That user can then merge the changes found in your repository with the original repository.
These three features – fork, pull request and merge – make GitHub a very powerful tool.
Github makes it a lot easier for individuals and teams to use Git for version control and collaboration.
To get started with GitHub:
•Sign up for a free GitHub account
•Follow the GitHub Hello World guide to understand the most popular actions you can carry out.
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