Git for Teams

Part III. Git Hosting

The first two parts of the book included commands specific to Git, not any one particular code hosting platform. In Part III, you will learn about three popular collaboration platforms: GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. In the many projects I’ve worked on, I find that my work often falls into these divisions: open source projects are often hosted on GitHub; private, client work is often hosted on Bitbucket; and projects that are concerned with autonomy are often hosted internally on GitLab.

There are no formal restrictions that say you must use these systems in this way. Indeed, there is an enterprise version of GitHub, which allows you to purchase a “locally hosted” instance of GitHub; and there is a community edition of GitLab, which offers free hosting of private and public Git repositories.

Entire books have been written on how to use each of these three platforms. Instead of trying to replicate these works, each of the subsequent chapters is designed as a “Getting Started” guide for the ways I most commonly see these platforms used. Chapter 10 covers using GitHub for public, open source projects; Chapter 11 covers using Bitbucket for private, closed source projects; and Chapter 12 covers using GitLab to host private, internal repositories.