GitHub is the leading code-hosting platform with literally millions of open source projects having their code hosted on it. In conjunction with Git, it provides the means for a productive development workflow and is the preferred tool among developers. Starting with the basics of creating a repository, you will then learn how to manage the issue tracker, where your project can be discussed. 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 pull requests feature that made GitHub so well known. Next, we will focus on creating simple web pages hosted on GitHub and lastly we explore the settings that are configurable for a user and a repository.
Chapter 1, Brief Repository Overview and Usage of the Issue Tracker, explains some of the main features GitHub provides and what you can make out of them. The issue tracker is the heart of communication between a project's developers and/or users. Consider it as a notepad dedicated to each repository where you track bugs, reports, feature requests, and anything else that can be written down. GitHub has implemented many other features that sit on top of the issue tracker, such as labels and milestones, which provide the ability to better visualize and categorize all the issues.
Chapter 2, Using the Wiki and Managing Code Versioning, helps you learn how to create, edit, and maintain a wiki by providing a home for your documentation that will complement your project. You will also learn how to create a new release out of an existing branch or tag, accompanied with optional release notes. In this way, the end user can understand the changes from any previous versions.
Chapter 3, Managing Organizations and Teams, helps you learn how to create and manage the organizations that you are the owner of. You will also learn how to create teams, add users to them, and assign different access levels according to your needs.
Chapter 4, Collaboration Using the GitHub Workflow, helps you learn how to work with branches and pull requests, the most powerful features of GitHub.
Chapter 5, GitHub Pages and Web Analytics, helps you learn how to build web pages around your project, hosted exclusively on GitHub. You have the ability to make static web pages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Chapter 6, Exploring the User and Repository Settings, explores the most common and essential settings of a user and a repository. As a user, there is a lot of information you can set up in your user settings page, such as associating more than one e-mail to your account, adding multiple SSH keys, or setting up two-factor authentication. Similarly, some functionalities of a repository can be set up via its settings page. For example, you can enable or disable the wiki pages and grant write access to the public or completely disable the issue tracker.
This book is intended for experienced or novice developers with a basic knowledge of Git. If you ever wanted to learn how big projects such as Twitter, Google, or even GitHub, collaborate on code, then this book is for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Let's first create a README file and push it to GitHub in order to explore the commits page."
A block of code is set as follows:
echo "# github-essentials" >> README.md git init git add README.md git commit -m "first commit" git remote add origin [email protected]:<username>/<repository>.git git push -u origin master
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo gem install bundler
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The Network graph shows the branch history of the main repository as well as its forks."
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