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.
Github is a code repository to store different versions of the code and for multiple people working on a project to collaborate and share their code and produce releases. most of what you use day to day are compiled programs. They take the sourcecode, and then compile it to create executablles (exe as an example). A lot of Github repositories dont provide a compiled version of the code, that is often released their site or through other avenues. For interpreted languages (python, javascript, etc.) you need something that can run that code. You can install Python and then run python.exe to execute the script that you downloaded. Python is interpreting the code on the fly and executing it for you. Compiled programs are what you are most familiar with and require a compiler which are not too common and can proprietary.
Its like getting a take and bake pizza. You have a pizza, you just gotta bake it. Which means you need an oven 🙂
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