GitHub is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. It lets you and others work together on projects from anywhere.
This tutorial teaches you GitHub essentials like repositories, branches, commits, and pull requests. You'll create your own Hello World repository and learn GitHub's pull request workflow, a popular way to create and review code.
A repository is usually used to organize a single project. Repositories can contain folders and files, images, videos, spreadsheets, and data sets -- anything your project needs. Often, repositories include a README file, a file with information about your project. README files are written in the plain text Markdown language. You can use this cheat sheet to get started with Markdown syntax. GitHub lets you add a README file at the same time you create your new repository. GitHub also offers other common options such as a license file, but you do not have to select any of them now.
Branching lets you have different versions of a repository at one time.
By default, your repository has one branch named main that is considered to be the definitive branch. You can create additional branches off of main in your repository. You can use branches to have different versions of a project at one time. This is helpful when you want to add new features to a project without changing the main source of code. The work done on different branches will not show up on the main branch until you merge it, which we will cover later in this guide. You can use branches to experiment and make edits before committing them to main.
When you create a branch off the main branch, you're making a copy, or snapshot, of main as it was at that point in time. If someone else made changes to the main branch while you were working on your branch, you could pull in those updates.
When you created a new branch in the previous step, GitHub brought you to the code page for your new readme-edits branch, which is a copy of main.
You can make and save changes to the files in your repository. On GitHub, saved changes are called commits. Each commit has an associated commit message, which is a description explaining why a particular change was made. Commit messages capture the history of your changes so that other contributors can understand what you’ve done and why.