What is GitHub?

What is GitHub?

GitHub, Inc. is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project.

Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. It is commonly used to host open-source software development projects.

Services

Projects on GitHub.com can be accessed and managed using the standard Git command-line interface; all standard Git commands work with it. GitHub.com also allows users to browse public repositories on the site.

Multiple desktop clients and Git plugins are also available. The site provides social networking-like functions such as feeds, followers, wikis (using wiki software called Gollum) and a social network graph to display how developers work on their versions ("forks") of a repository and what fork (and branch within that fork) is newest.

GitHub Enterprise

GitHub Enterprise is a self-managed version of GitHub.com with similar functionality. It can be run on an organization's own hardware or on a cloud provider, and it has been available since November 2011.

Other providers

A source-code-hosting facility (also known as forge) is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately.

They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to maintain revision and version history, or version control. Many repositories provide a bug tracking system, and offer release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based project documentation.

Some other providers include:

• Azure DevOps

• Bitbucket

• GitLab

• Gitea

• GForge

• SourceForge