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

Question

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

Answer 1

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).