Eli5 Can anyone tell me what is github and how do people normally use it or understand?

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I’ve recently come across the name ‘github’ and i know that it is a server in Scandinavia somewhere which people can apparently use it somehow idk. Would help if you someone could lay down everything regarding it…

In: Technology

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is a version control tool called “Git” that software developers use. It handles incremental version management of software so that you can have multiple branches and handle merging them together, or do things like handle rollbacks.

GitHub is a service that offers a centralized repository for Git. You can push your repository here and other people can pull from your repository.

The best explanation… GitHub is to Git as PornHub is to Porn.

Anonymous 0 Comments

GitHub is a cloud storage site for Git repositories. Git is a version control system for software development, allowing developers to roll back their code to previous versions, branch off and develop new code without affecting the old, and various other useful things.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s a place to share open source projects, mostly coding projects, but not necessarily, so that people can easily contribute to the project

Anonymous 0 Comments

A site to share program code and collaborate with other software developers. It’s not that different from a plain old filesharing service like Dropbox. It has however a massive amount of tools that simplify working as a team on a single piece of code, in its entirety called **Git**. This makes it possible to e.g. “fork off” your own versions, make changes, and then automatically “merge” them back into the main version after you’ve finished doing your work.

And it’s not the only site that uses Git in this way, just the most popular one. Git is free software, anyone with a web server could set up a similar service.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Github is an online platform for managing software code. As you can imagine, with dozens of programmers working on a project that could be several million lines of code, you need a good way of tracking who made what changes when, what those changes were, and so on. Github gives you that and some other useful tools like bug tracking, feature requests (for users to request new functionality) , and some other project management tools.

Some people have expanded its use beyond just code. After all, code is just text with a particular meaning to a compiler for that language. So they’ll use GitHub to manage other text-based documents where they also need that level of tracking and group editing capability.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When people write programs, they can use github to version, manage, and store their code. Generally speaking, it’s a version control system that provides developers to save their code code while developing.

It also allows teams to work together on projects through a concept called branching. Branching allows two or more people to start from the same code base and work on different aspects of the program, later merging their changes together. At this point, the developers will work through any merge conflicts, and after pulling their hair out and pleading with gods borrowed from every religion imaginable, will usually have a stable, improved program.

Anonymous 0 Comments

>server in Scandinavia somewhere

It’s a lot more than that. Microsoft paid $7.8 billion to buy Github in 2018.

As others have said, it’s primarily a way for software developers to store their source code and collaborate on projects. It also has a lot of project management tools built into it. Its very popular for open source projects, but many commercial projects use it to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

to understand github you have to understand version control systems. software developers use version control systems to keep track of changes they make in their programs. git is a popular opensource version control system. github gives you free git hosting so that many people can collaborate on a software project or you can showcase your project to a wide audience. so basically it’s taking a free program and adding value to it by building these social tools around it and providing an easy to navigate website so people can browse your code using their web browsers.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When programmers write software, their source code is usually just plain text, stored in text files. When you have big software projects, you need to split that code up into multiple files and folders. You also need a way for multiple developers to work on the same project without interfering with each other, keep track of who made what changes to the code, be able to undo changes, allow the code to be branched off to develop different features, then merged back in when complete, and so on. Thus the concept of a Version Control System was created.

Git is one such product for doing version control, it happened to be created by the same guy that created Linux, Linus Torvalds. Git is free software.

GitHub is an online service that provides hosting for Git-based code repositories. It does other stuff too, like the ability to automatically build, test and release software. GitHub is free, to an extent, with paid plans for more features.

There are two main users of GitHub:

* Developers, who want a place to safely store/backup their code (ie. all the benefits cloud services usually bring), or to collaborate with other developers.
* End users, who just want to download the source code, or its end result (ie. a compiled software application they can use).

As for Scandinavia, I’m not sure what exactly you’re referring to. GitHub, like most cloud services, has many servers located all around the world. Linus Torvalds is from Finland, which is often confused as (but not actually) part of Scandinavia. Or you may be referring to the [GitHub Archive Program](https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-program-the-journey-of-the-worlds-open-source-code-to-the-arctic/), where in July of this year, GitHub took a snapshot of all their public code repositories and stored it in an Arctic vault in Svalbard, Norway (close to the Global Seed Vault).