Collaborating and sharing using GitHub without command line

This tutorial provides a brief but hands-on introduction to Git and GitHub to exercise useful workflows within GitHub. Git is a version control system which allows files and data to be tracked synchronized, which allows collaboration and reproducibility. GitHub is a popular website that stores these repositories.

This tutorial avoids using the command line. Instead, we will practice collaborating and sharing using either the GitHub website or GitHub desktop application. Why? Because for many cases, it is enough. Especially if you are contributing to existing non-code projects, this may be the fastest, easiest way to do it. Git and GitHub provide collaboration tools to all kinds of projects, and there are all kinds of good ways to use it.

This serves as an introduction to Git. After this lesson, you will both be able to use Git, and feel much more confident taking a command-line course Git course such as CodeRefinery’s git-intro course. Check out our other upcoming workshops.

Why GitHub

We will do this exercise on GitHub but also GitLab and Bitbucket allow similar workflows and basically everything that we will discuss is transferable. With this material and these exercises we do not endorse the company GitHub. We have chosen to demonstrate a number of concepts using examples with GitHub because it is currently the most popular web platform for hosting Git repositories and the chance is high that you will interact with GitHub-based repositories even if you choose to host your Git repository on another platform.

We also encourage course participants to use our new Nordic research software repository platform, for more information see https://coderefinery.org/repository/.

The lesson

20 min	Basics and motivation
30 min	Creating repositories using the web interface
40 min	Creating repositories using GitHub Desktop
60 min	Contributing to existing repositories using pull requests
30 min	How to organize a group’s work
30 min	Making your project citable
30 min	Hosting websites/homepages on GitHub Pages

Reference

• Quick reference
• Instructor’s guide

Preparations

Not required:

• Previous knowledge of Git or GitHub

• Knowledge of the command line

Prerequisites

Please prepare these before the workshop:

• Install the Zoom client (our tips)

• Get a GitHub account (here are instructions on how to remove it later if you do not wish to keep it)

• Install GitHub Desktop:

  • Windows and macOS

  • Linux

• Read the following quick guides on attending workshops:

  • Read our tips on in person or online workshops

  • Zoom signals we use

  • How we use HackMD

Troubleshooting:

• GitHub Desktop not showing up on macOS launchpad:

  • You can find it in “Downloads”

Optional reading:

• Quickly get started with common tasks on GitHub

See also

These similar workshops which serve as inspiration

• https://github.com/lexnederbragt/github_collab_workshop

• https://github.com/arockenberger/github_collab_workshop