GitHub -Where the world builds software
GitHub Where the world builds software
Millions of developers and companies build, ship, and maintain their software on GitHub — the largest and most advanced development platform in the world.
GitHub, Inc. is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git, plus its own features. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, continuous integration wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
It is commonly used to host open-source projects. As of January 2020, GitHub reports having over 40 million users and more than 190 million repositories (including at least 28 million public repositories). It is the largest source code host as of April 2020.
History
GitHub at AWS Summit
GitHub.com
Development of the GitHub.com platform began on October 19, 2007. The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, and Scott Chacon after it had been made available for a few months prior as a beta release.
Acquisition by Microsoft
Microsoft on top of the list of the ten organizations with the most open-source contributors on GitHub in 2016
From 2012, Microsoft became a significant user of GitHub, using it to host open-source projects and development tools such as .NET Core, Chakra Core, MSBuild, PowerShell, PowerToys, Visual Studio Code, Windows Calculator, Windows Terminal, and the bulk of its product documentation (now to be found on Microsoft Docs).
On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion. The deal closed on October 26, 2018. GitHub continued to operate independently as a community, platform, and business. Under Microsoft, the service was led by Xamarin’s Nat Friedman, reporting to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI. GitHub’s CEO, Chris Wanstrath, was retained as a “technical fellow,” also reporting to Guthrie.
GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages is a static web hosting service offered by GitHub since 2008 to GitHub users for hosting user blogs, project documentation, or even whole books created as a page.
All GitHub Pages content is stored in a Git repository, either as files served to visitors verbatim or in Markdown format. GitHub is seamlessly integrated with Jekyll static website and blog generator and GitHub continuous integration pipelines. Each time the content source is updated, Jekyll regenerates the website and automatically serves it via GitHub Pages infrastructure.
As with the rest of GitHub, it includes both free and paid tiers of service, instead of being supported by web advertising. Web sites generated through this service are hosted either as subdomains of the github.io domain or as custom domains bought through a third-party domain name registrar. When a custom domain is set on a GitHub Pages to repo a Let’s Encrypt certificate for it is generated automatically. Once the certificate has been generated Enforce HTTPS can be set for the repository’s website to transparently redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS.
About wikis
You can host documentation for your repository in a wiki so that others can use and contribute to your project.
Wikis are available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see “GitHub’s products.”
Every GitHub repository comes equipped with a section for hosting documentation, called a wiki. You can use your repository’s wiki to share long-form content about your project, such as how to use it, how you designed it, or its core principles. A README file quickly tells what your project can do, while you can use a wiki to provide additional documentation. For more information, see “About READMEs.”
With wikis, you can write content just like everywhere else on GitHub. For more information, see “Getting started with writing and formatting on GitHub.” We use our open-source Markup library to convert different formats into HTML, so you can choose to write in Markdown or any other supported format.
If you create a wiki in a public repository, the wiki is available to the public. If you create a wiki in an internal or private repository, people with access to the repository can also access the wiki. For more information, see “Setting repository visibility.”
You can edit wikis directly on GitHub, or you can edit wiki files locally. By default, only people with write access to your repository can make changes to wikis, although you can allow everyone on GitHub to contribute to a wiki in a public repository. For more information, see “Changing access permissions for wikis”.
