Are you wondering what Github is? Here is an easy and non-technical explanation of the most frequent terms used. First thing first, GIT and GitHub are not the same things.
Git
Git is a management system that keeps track of all the changes you make.
- Its a software on your computer which is locally available on your device.
- It’s free and open-source (free to reuse, redistribute and modify) software.
- You can save the progress(changes you make/versions) for any documents, codes in any language, websites and any other data/ information using GIT.
GitHub
GitHub is website (like Gitlab,BitBucket).
- It’s like putting your code along with progress (record of changes you made) on the internet.
- Your code is now open source(if you make it public). Moreover, people can go through your progress records(all the changes recorded while developing the code).
- GitHub uses Git but also adds many of its features.
- GitHub provides a graphical interface (You can click buttons to make folders and other stuff instead of writing commands).
Repository
It’s a folder.
- More than an ordinary folder that only has data. It has data and the history of the changes in that data.
- You can take any ordinary folder and make it a repository (adding a history tracking folder to it). This is called initializing a repository.
- Or you can copy an existing Git repository from elsewhere. This is called cloning a repository
Branches
The branch is a copy of the original work.
- You can make changes in the branch without affecting the original work. All the new changes will be saved in a new branch.
- These changes can be requested to be merged to the main branch or deleted completely if not required.
Version control
Version control is the practice of tracking and managing changes to software code. So any software of system that tracks and manages changes is version control software. Thus Git is a version control software that tracks the changes from one version to the next version of that Code/Data.