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
Github is repository of the source code(not-compiled) data for program. The first page usually has two things: Overall data structure of the project, which shouldn’t be important for non-programmer, and contents of the file called Readme.md, which is a file that’s supposed to explain to whoever came to that repository, what they’re looking at, how to make it work, and such. Usually, if there is click-and-go type installation available for the project, it’s mentioned in that readme.md file.
If the readme.md doesn’t contain any info that seems relevant to you, it might be you’re expected to run it on your own. It’s nearly impossible to give you any guide on how to do that in general case, but usually it is fairly straight-forward case of first, identifying tools you need to have available to compile this code at all(for example, python interpreter is needed to run .py files), and then second, following the step-by-step instructions given in readme.md. However, there are many ways in which the instructions might be incomplete and you might encounter problems that require pretty deep knowledge to fix on your own, so…
Since you gave example of python, it’s often fairly straightforward. You need python interpreter. You download the entire project(either through git program, or as a zip file) and place it somewhere. You install all the pre-requisite programs(for python specifically, it’s usually a line after line of “pip install <package name>” put into… Well, given that you use Windows, I’m actually not entirely sure, but I think after installing Python on windows, pip should work on command prompt? When you’re installing python it should make special mention somehow about where you can expect to find all these tools. Microsoft Powershell should work too. Anyway, pre-requisites are usually listed in readme.md file, and it usually includes those pip install commands so you just copy paste them, download stuff, and you’re ready to go.
Next up, in terminal, command prompt, powershell or whatever you end up using to pass these commands, you’d probably type something akin to “python ~/downloads/big_project/main.py”. To make it work, you might need to learn a bit about folder navigation within the terminal you use, or use full path to the file. The program should now be running.
There are many steps here that might go wrong, but I think you have very good chance of getting the program to work regardless. But it mostly depends on how well the program is documented(readme.md specifically)
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