:octocat: GitHub Flow

The GitHub flow is a lightweight workflow that allows you to experiment and collaborate on your projects easily, without the risk of losing your previous work. We will learn this in lab, to prepare, here is a preview of the vocabulary.

Repositories

A repository is where your project work happens–think of it as your project folder. It contains all of your project’s files and the history of each one. You can work within a repository alone or invite others to collaborate with you on those files.

Cloning

When a repository is created with GitHub, it’s stored remotely in the ☁️. You can clone a repository to create a local copy on your computer and then use Git to sync the two. This makes it easier to fix issues, add or remove files, and push larger commits. You can also use the editing tool of your choice as opposed to the GitHub UI. Cloning a repository also pulls down all the repository data that GitHub has at that point in time, including all versions of every file and folder for the project! This can be helpful if you experiment with your project and then realize you liked a previous version more. To learn more about cloning, read “Cloning a Repository”.

Committing and pushing

Committing and pushing are how you can add the changes you made on your local machine to the remote repository in GitHub. That way your instructor and/or teammates can see your latest work when you’re ready to share it. You can make a commit when you have made changes to your project that you want to “checkpoint.” You can also add a helpful commit message to remind yourself or your teammates what work you did (e.g. “Added a README with information about our project”).

Once you have a commit or multiple commits that you’re ready to add to your repository, you can use the push command to add those changes to your remote repository. Committing and pushing may feel new at first, but we promise you’ll get used to it 🙂