Environment
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At the heart of GitHub is an open source version control system (VCS) called Git, which is responsible for everything GitHub-related that happens locally on your computer.
Besides Git and GitHub you will also need a text editor, but I assume you already have one on your device.
If you’ve never used Git or GitHub before, there are a few things that you need to do. It’s , but repeated here for simplification.
Get a account.
Download and install .
Set up Git with your user name and email.
Open a Git Bash shell and type:
Then store your credentials by typing:
Repository - most basic element of GitHub. They're easiest to imagine as a project's folder.
Remote/Local - repository can be hosted on a server (our case GitHub), or on a local machine.
Collaborator/Contributor - contributor is someone who has contributed to a project, while collaborator is a person with read and write access to a repository who has been invited to contribute by the repository owner.
Downstream/Upstream - when local and remote repository are connected, remote is considered upstream, and local downstream.
Public/Private - private repository can only be viewed or contributed to by their creator and collaborators, public by everybody.
Clone - copy of a repository that lives on your computer instead of on a website's server somewhere, or the act of making that copy.
Fork - personal copy of another user's repository that lives on your account.
Branch - parallel version of a repository.
Pull - refers to when you are fetching in changes and merging them.
Commit - "snapshot" of individual change to a file (or set of files).
Push - refers to sending your committed changes to a remote repository.
Issue - suggested improvements, tasks or questions related to the repository. Issues can be created by anyone (for public repositories).
If you want to learn more about terminology, make sure to check out the detailed .