introduction-to-github

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.