Github is an online service offering hosting for software development and version control using Git. Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle small to large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is designed for coordinating work among programmers, but it can be used to track changes in any set of files. Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for the development of the Linux kernel. Version control helps developers to track and manage changes in a project’s software code.
Github consists of Repositories, Branches, Commits, Pull Requests, and Git. A GitHub repository is a place to store development projects. You can store HTML, JavaScript, CSS, documents, images, data in folders, or files. A GitHub branch is used to work with different versions of a repository at the same time. In Github, changes are called commits. A pull request is to propose changes that should be merged (pulled in) with the master.
Repositories
Repositories (repo) is the location where the files of a project are stored in Github. You can access the files using a unique URL, for example, the Bootstrap project URL is https://github.com/twbs.
Branching
In branching, the developer duplicates part of the source code. So the developer or other developers can make changes only to that part of the code without affecting the rest of the project.
Merging
Once the developer(s) completed the part of his code, he can merge that code back into the main source code to make it public.
Github is a cloud-based Git hosting service, that makes individuals or teams collaborate and version control with a project. Github interface is user-friendly so there is no need for command-line tools.
You can also write well-formatted books with Github. You can use GitBook to create documents, it is a documentation platform where teams can document everything from products to internal knowledge-bases and APIs.
