The Complete Beginner's Guide to GitHub

If you’ve been following along with the last two posts, you should now have a basic idea of what GitHub is and how it works, and you should also have the infrastructure in place to start using it. Now let’s create our first repository. Open GitHub Desktop and click the blue “Create a tutorial repository…” button at the top of the left-hand column. Then click “Continue” in the dialog box that shows up. You will be prompted to authorize GitHub Desktop to access your GitHub account; as in the previous post, click the green button to authorize. You may need to reenter your GitHub password. You will then be taken to the screen below: The first step when using GitHub is to create a branch . You can see in the toolbar at the top of the window that one branch, main , has already been created for us. This is the default branch for our repo. In a repository containing executable application code, the main branch is usually the most recent stable version of the application. For thi...

Welcome back! Now that we have a basic overview of what GitHub is, let’s get ready to start using it. In order to do that, we need two things: a GitHub account and the GitHub Desktop client. Let’s handle the account first. Creating a GitHub Account Go to github.com , enter your email address in the box in the middle of the screen, and click the green “Sign up for GitHub” button. Enter a password and click “Continue.” The password must either be at least 15 characters long or be at least 8 characters long and include both a number and a lowercase letter. After clicking “Continue,” you will be prompted to enter a username. The username may contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens, and must not be a username that is already in use by another GitHub user. Click “Continue” again. You will now be asked whether you want to receive email updates and announcments from GitHub. Enter y to receive such updates or n to opt out, ...