explaingit

skills/introduction-to-github

10,100Audience · generalComplexity · 1/5LicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

An interactive one-hour GitHub exercise that teaches complete beginners the four core steps, branching, committing, pull requests, and merging, by having you build your own GitHub profile page.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Intro to GitHub))
    What it does
      Guided exercise
      Profile README build
      Automated feedback
    Concepts Taught
      Branching
      Committing
      Pull requests
      Merging
    Audience
      Complete beginners
      New developers
      Students
    Tech Used
      GitHub Actions
      Markdown
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Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Complete the exercise to learn the full GitHub workflow (branch, commit, pull request, merge) in under an hour with no prior experience.

USE CASE 2

Create your own GitHub profile README file as a practical output you can keep and show others.

USE CASE 3

Use as an onboarding exercise to introduce new team members or students to GitHub fundamentals.

Tech stack

GitHub ActionsMarkdown

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
MIT license, use, copy, modify, and distribute freely for any purpose, including commercial, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

In plain English

This repository is an interactive exercise created by GitHub to teach the basics of using GitHub, designed to take less than an hour to complete. It is aimed at people who are new to GitHub or new to software development in general, with no prior experience required. The exercise walks through four core concepts that anyone working with GitHub needs to understand. First, you create a branch, which is a separate copy of a project where you can make changes without affecting the main version. Then you commit a file, meaning you save a specific change with a short description of what you did. After that, you open a pull request, which is a way of proposing that your changes be reviewed and merged into the main branch. Finally, you carry out the merge itself. The concrete thing you build during the exercise is a short Markdown text file that can serve as your GitHub profile README, a page that appears on your public GitHub profile to introduce yourself to other users. To start, you copy the exercise template into your own GitHub account. A GitHub Actions workflow then sets up the first step automatically and guides you through each stage by updating the instructions as you complete each task. The exercise is part of GitHub Skills, a collection of guided exercises GitHub provides for learning its platform. The repository itself is licensed under the MIT license.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I just finished the GitHub Skills introduction exercise. Explain what each of the four steps, branch, commit, pull request, merge, actually does and why the order matters.
Prompt 2
Help me write a GitHub profile README that introduces me as a developer who is just learning to code.
Prompt 3
I'm teaching a class of beginners GitHub basics. How do I set up this skills/introduction-to-github exercise so each student gets their own copy to work through independently?
Prompt 4
What is the difference between a branch and a fork in GitHub? Use the concepts from the introduction-to-github exercise to explain.
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