Appendix B. Creating a GitHub account and repository
GitHub is a website that provides Git repository hosting as well as issue trackers, Git-backed wikis, and a workflow to request a merge of the commits in a branch (which is known as a pull request and is discussed in section 10.1). You can create free accounts for public remote repositories, where everyone can see your code and commits. Typically these are used by open source projects, but they will also prove useful for your learning and experimentation.
As mentioned in chapter 2, there are free and paid alternatives to GitHub. I’ve picked GitHub to walk through because, at the time of writing, it’s the most popular hosted version control system for open source projects and is probably the most popular Git hosting provider. Learning to use GitHub will bring you immediate benefits in terms of facilitating open source access and contributions. Although the GitHub UI may differ from the examples here or from other Git repository hosts, the Git commands used will be the same.
Let’s sign up for a new GitHub account. Browse to https://github.com/join, where you should see something like figure B.1.
