Git for Teams

Chapter 10. Open Source Projects on GitHub

With more than nine million users, GitHub is the largest code hosting platform in the world today. If you are a web developer, or involved in open source software development, chances are good you have at least visited the GitHub website to download some code, if not created an account and participated in a development community. Those who are working on proprietary code development may know less about GitHub, but that doesn’t make it less relevant as a code hosting platform, because GitHub also allows you to create private repositories if you don’t want to share your code.

The focus of this chapter will be using GitHub for open project development, because this tends to be how most newcomers will first be exposed to the system. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to complete the following on GitHub:

• Create a new account

• Create an organization

• Create a new project

• Solicit contributions from new collaborators

• Accept pull requests from collaborators

Up to this point, the repository examples you’ve been working with were hosted on GitLab. Unlike GitLab, GitHub’s platform is not based on open source software. GitHub can definitely improve your experience with Git, but has several of its own GitHub-isms that can make it difficult to know when you’re working with Git terms, and when you’re working with GitHub terms.

GitHub has a few great features that I have been able to take advantage of as a web builder. ...