Git and GitHub

What is Git?

Git is software for version control (keeping track of the changes and history of files).

What is GitHub?

GitHub is a website that hosts git repositories. It also has tools to enable collaboration on software using git.

Getting Started with Git

RStudio includes a GUI interface to git, which will cover almost all the cases you will encounter in this course. For quick introduction on learn how to use Version control within RStudio, I suggest the “Version Control” chapter of the Working with the RStudio IDE (Part 2) DataCamp course.

However, if you are comfortable with the command line I suggest you learn how to use git from the command line. See the references below for more information.

Relationship between GitHub and Local Git Projects

Relationship between git and GitHub

References

There are many references/introductions and tutorials on git and GitHub available. However, be aware that many of these are written for programmers/software engineers who may have different use-cases for git than you will have working on research in a small team or solo.

Here are a few that I’ve found useful.