GitHub Introduction

Introduction

In the last subunit, you learned how to manage repositories locally. But what happens if your computer gets stolen or destroyed, or more likely if you want to access our codebase from a new machine?

In this subunit, we'll introduce you to GitHub, a cloud-based code repository built around Git. Though there are other code repositories, GitHub is the most popular in the world and is the industry standard. Combined with effective use of Git you learned about in the last subunit, GitHub will allow you to master working effectively with a team.

Goals

Compare and contrast Git and GitHub
List use cases for GitHub
Get started with GitHub!

What is GitHub

GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service.

Put, it is a tool that enables collaboration by hosting shared Git repositories that teams of developers can all contribute to.

While GitHub uses Git, the functionality it provides is VERY different from Git, so make sure you understand that Git and GitHub are not the same thing.

In short, Git is a Version Control System. GitHub is an online platform for hosting and sharing code, text files, and even more complex file formats.

Why use GitHub

It provides a great way for you to store your code in a remote location

It's a fantastic way to collaborate with other developers both privately and publicly

Many large open-source projects are hosted on GitHub, which makes it straightforward to examine the code both on GitHub and locally

In the next couple of chapters, we will learn how to move code from our local repository to a remote repository on GitHub using the push command

Who uses GitHub

Here are some projects you may have heard of that are hosted there:

Getting started with GitHub

If you don’t have an account with GitHub yet, head to GitHub and create an account

Be sure to use whatever email address is in your .gitconfig

If you’d rather sign up with a different email address, change your .gitconfig accordingly

You’ll run into some minor annoyances if there’s a mismatch between the email address in your GitHub profile and the email address in your .gitconfig

Creating Remote Repositories on GitHub

Navigate to GitHub new
After naming and creating a new repository click create repository
Follow the second block of instructions for pushing an existing repository from the command line

What are we doing here?

Adding a remote
Calling it “origin”

What’s a remote

It’s a nickname for a URL where your repository lives!
Instead of typing/remembering the entire URL, we give it a nickname
By default, this nickname is ‘origin’
git remote add NAME_OF_REMOTE URL_FOR_REPOSITORY
- NAME_OF_REMOTE: origin
- [URL_FOR_REPOSITORY]: https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_REPO

git remote add

This command tells our local repository about a remote repository located somewhere.

The location of our remote repository is https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_REPO.git.

git push origin

Now if we want to send our code to GitHub, we could type in git push https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_REPO.git master but typing that whole URL is quite a pain.

Instead, we give the URL a nickname (also called an alias)—“origin”

Once the alias is set up, we can simply type
git push origin master
This will send the code from our master branch to this remote repository.
To see where your remotes are pointing to locally, type git remote -v.
This will display both the alias and the remote url

If you need to remove a remote, you can use git remote rm NAME_OF_REMOTE

Pushing Your Code

The command we use is git push NAME_OF_REMOTE NAME_OF_BRANCH

Setting the upstream

git push -u origin master

Now we can send our code from a local repository to our remote repository (which we aliased to origin in the previous command).

The -u flag will allow us in the future to only have to type git push instead of git push origin master.

Pushing code up to GitHub

Now when you type in git push, you will be prompted to enter your username and password for GitHub. While that is fine once or twice, it becomes quite a nuisance if you are pushing or pulling (retrieving code) frequently.

It would be nice if we could establish some trust between our computer and GitHub so that when we run git push or git pull, GitHub does not need to authenticate us. To do that, we are going to create an SSH key.

Last modified: 10 March 2024