Book Image

GitHub Essentials

By : Achilleas Pipinellis
Book Image

GitHub Essentials

By: Achilleas Pipinellis

Overview of this book

<p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">Whether you are an experienced developer or a novice, learning to work with Version Control Systems is a must in the software development world. Git is the most popular tool for that purpose and GitHub was built around it leveraging its powers by bringing it to the web.</span></p> <p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">Starting with the basics of creating a repository you will then learn how to manage the issue tracker, the place where discussion about your project takes place. Continuing our journey we will explore how to use the wiki and write rich documentation that will accompany your project. Organization and team management will be the next stop and then onto the feature that made GitHub so well known, Pull Requests. Next we focus on creating simple web pages hosted on GitHub and lastly we explore the settings that are configurable for a user and a repository.</span></p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Learn about pull requests


Pull request is the number one feature in GitHub that made it what it is today. It was introduced in early 2008 and is being used extensively among projects since then.

Tip

While everything else can be pretty much disabled in a project's settings (such as issues and the wiki), pull requests are always enabled.

Why pull requests are a powerful asset to work with

Whether you are working on a personal project where you are the sole contributor or on a big open source one with contributors from all over the globe, working with pull requests will certainly make your life easier.

I like to think of pull requests as chunks of commits, and the GitHub UI helps you visualize clearer what is about to be merged in the default branch or the branch of your choice. Pull requests are reviewable with an enhanced diff view. You can easily revert them with a simple button on GitHub and they can be tested before merging, if a CI service is enabled in the project.

The connection between branches...