Git is an excellent, and industry-recognized
version-control system.
GitHub.com, the website, makes that accessible to everyone.
♪ (bossa theme music throughout) ♪
It's easy to think that you could host your Git repositories anywhere.
There's plenty of services,
and plenty of tools for you to host them,
even within your own corporate firewall.
But there's more than just hosting your code.
We're talking about changing software,
and that includes all types, and all facets of collaboration:
filing issues, organizing repositories so they're easy to find,
being able to mention the contributors by user name,
and the ability to have control over the inbound changes
through the concept that we call pull requests.
All of these are facilitated by GitHub.com,
a collaboration platform that also hosts Git repositories.
Your first interaction with GitHub
is likely through the Explore page,
finding a bit of open source
that solves a need in your current application.
But soon you'll find you want to file an issue,
or perhaps even submit a change to a project
that improves it, or corrects a defect.
Those are all things that are made possible
by the GitHub platform.
You'll find that we have solutions,
such as an integrated defect tracker,
and the process of pull requests,
to which code change can get reviewed,
commented on, refined, and then finally accepted,
even for people that are not core contributors
to the project itself.
GitHub adds further innovations that allow Git to go places
that it wouldn't ordinarily have been welcome.
For example, we have an SvnBridge that allows any Git repository
to be treated as a subversion repository.
This often facilitates a slow migration
of continuous integration infrastructure,
build scripts, or other automation
that you've built into your release process.
GitHub also has the concept of the web flow.
This brings most of the Git operations to the web browser.
No cloning the repository to disk,
no loading of Git software on your local machine,
especially if it's a shared terminal,
just an editor, with syntax highlighting,
directly in the browser,
for any of the files in a repository.
Rename them, move them, delete them, add brand new files,
change all kinds of things about the project,
directly from the browser.
This means that Git is far more accessible
to the members of your organization, open source project,
or company, than would be if they required the desktop tools
to interact with this repository.
As documentation is recognized
to be a critical part of every software project,
having support for prose, both in the repositories
and in the surrounding commentary, is extremely important.
GitHub supports GitHub-flavored markdown,
which is an improvement on the core markdown language
in issues, pull requests, and even in documents
that are contributed to the core of the repository itself.
Simply give them a .md extension, put them in the repository
as you would any other file,
and you'll see them rendered with changes,
as you would expect from a document editor.
Lines are struck out that are removed,
lines appropriately show where they've been relocated to,
and lines that are put in as additions are shown in green.
It doesn't end with just code and documents, though.
We're adding support for things
like 3D models, an STL file format,
and GeoJSON, for maps.
Those render in the browser, meaning that tools you'd ordinarily
have to purchase and download to your local machine,
complexly set up, configure and install,
now just render directly in the browser,
making those files all the more accessible
for anyone visiting that repository.
GitHub is the unifying platform
that brings together a web flow
that would ordinarily require desktop tools,
both for working with Git,
as well as rendering these complex markdown, STL, and GeoJSON files
into an online experience that's easy to use,
just moments after signing up for an account.
It means that collaboration happens more frequently,
with less friction,
and more contributions get made
to both open- and closed-source projects
because of this product.
Thanks for watching this episode of Git and GitHub Foundations
on the GitHub.com platform.
Be sure to subscribe to our episodes over here.
If you have a followup question, ask that down below.
We also appreciate comments.
And if you'd like some related videos,
those are all right down here,
including the use of pull requests.