Book Image

GitHub Essentials - Second Edition

By : Achilleas Pipinellis
4 (1)
Book Image

GitHub Essentials - Second Edition

4 (1)
By: Achilleas Pipinellis

Overview of this book

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. Starting with the basics of creating a repository, you will then learn how to manage the issue tracker, the place where discussions about your project take place. Continuing our journey, we will explore how to use the wiki and write rich documentation that will accompany your project. You will also master organization/team management and some of the features that made GitHub so well known, including pull requests. Next, we will focus on creating simple web pages hosted on GitHub and lastly, we will explore the settings that are configurable for a user and a repository.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Brief Repository Overview and Usage of the Issue Tracker

Almost everything that happens on GitHub happens in the context of the repository. A repository is like a folder that contains all the files of your project.

The landing page of a repository on GitHub depicts the content of a person's local Git repository. Apart from the tree-like structure of the files, GitHub also provides some additional features that bring the most well-known and frequently used Git commands to your browser. Among others, these include the branches, commits, and tags of your repository.

In addition to these features, GitHub also provides an issue tracker for each repository. This is where the discussions take place, bugs are tracked and reported, features are requested, and pretty much anything else that is relevant to the project is discussed.

GitHub has also implemented many other features that sit on top of the issue tracker, such as labels and milestones that provide the better visualization and categorization of issues. We will explore all the features extensively, so don't worry if you aren't familiar with these terms yet. Here's what we'll cover in this chapter:

  • Exploring the repository's main page

  • Learning how to use the powerful benefits of the issue tracker

The terms project and repository, although not the same thing, will be considered to have equal meaning, and will be used interchangeably throughout this book.