What is GitHub?

While Git is a distributed Version Control System (VCS), there is nothing to prevent you from having a central server to host your “blessed” Git repository. That is essentially what GitHub is: a hosting platform for your Git repositories.

Repositories on GitHub are bare repositories (see last section) where branches and commits can not be checked out, but they can be cloned ad infinitum. Also, users with the correct priviledges can push their changes directly to GitHub repositories.

But GitHub is a lot more than that!

GitHub can

• help you track issues,
• provide a framework for “Pull Requests”,
• help you conduct code reviews,
• help organize your project work,
• host a website for you (github.io),
• and much more.

We can’t go into all of this, but we’ll take a look at the basics to get you started.

You can read up on more of what GitHub can do here.