I normally consider myself pretty handy with computers, but I’m no programmer. I know GitHub is primarily for programmers, but I often find GitHub pages when looking for specific programs, and always end up walking away frustrated because anything I try to download just gives me a whole bunch of unfamiliar file-names and what I’m guessing is some uncompiled data? I really don’t know, and it just confuses me what I’m supposed to do in order to actually execute files I find on GitHub? I’ve heard something about Python and something about Cmd (Is that Windows Command Line Prompt?) and whenever I look up tutorials or guides for GitHub I find primer videos for programmers, not user friendly newbie guides for people who just want to download a piece of software.
In: Technology
This is the source code. You need to understand enough about programming to process it as a programmer would. You usually need to be familiar with your OS’s command line. Here are some questions you should try to figure out from the project’s documentation and some Googling:
– What language is the program written in?
– Does the language have a compilation step? How can you get tools for that?
– What is the usual way of running programs in the language?
– Does the program have any prerequisites? How do you install them?
– Does the language the program’s written in have a standard package manager (e.g. Pip for Python, Gem for Ruby, Node or Yarn for JavaScript)? Are there package management files?
There are a lot of steps and it can sometimes be a huge pain that might end up taking an hour or two even if you do this for a living and know exactly what you’re doing. If you’re completely new to all this, and only putting in time on evenings and weekends, getting a project up and running from Github might be a multi-week project.
I encourage you to try. You might bang your head against the wall quite a bit, but you’ll learn a lot.
A lot of this is simpler on Linux or other UNIX-like systems. If you use Windows, there are some pretty convenient ways to get a UNIX-like environment these days: Cygwin, Windows Subsystem for Linux, or a Virtualbox VM.
Latest Answers