In this lecture, we'll cover one of the most fundamental things that you can do with GitHub, which is creating a repository, or a repo. So, just to, recap, to refresh your memory, so we have two pieces of software that we talked about. So, Git is a piece of software that allows you to do version control of documents, like on your local computer. And then GitHub is a piece of software that allows you, well, it's a web service, that allows you to, deal with repos or repositories, remotely, on the web. So get GitHub allows you to share your repository's with others, access other users public repositories, and then store copies of your local repo's on the server in case something happens to your local version, you have a back up copy. So, there's a couple of different ways of creating a GitHub repository. One is you can start a repository from scratch, that's creating your own repo, and another is you can fork another user's repository. So we'll start off with the first method which is just creating your own repo from scratch and then we'll talk a little bit about how you can Fork or get information from another user and start working on their project. So key point to keep in mind is that when people talk about repositories, they often call, use repo. So, what you can do is, either go to your profile page, which is going to be github.com followed by your username. And click on create a new repo in the upper right hand corner of the page, or you could go directly to github.com/new you'll need to log in to your GitHub account if you want to do this second version. So, the first thing you need to do is create a name for your repo, and type a brief description so make your name a good idea is to make the name of the repo Googleable if you want to share it with other people. And then have a description that's pretty clear and descriptive of the things that you're going to be trying to do with the full files in that folder. And then one thing that you can do is you can select either a public or a private repo. Public repos are the default, and they're the free version, and they can be shared with anybody else. Private repos usually require a paid account but if you are at an educational institution you can often request up to five private repos. So then you definitely want to check the box with initialize this re, repository with a README and click the Create repository button down at the bottom. So after you've done that, you've created your first GitHub repository. So you can see that right now this is a file that's a repo, and Nick Carchetti. repo, and so you can see that it has a README document. Because we initialized it with a README file. And so the read me file, if you initiate with the README file, that will actually be what is, what you observe right here is the README file contents. And we'll talk a little bit more about how you can use mark down to create a sort of a README file that makes the repository very easy to understand. Now you can create a copy of this repo on your computer, so that you can make changes to it. So you can open Git Bash, and create a directory on your computer where you will store your copy of the repo. So, for example you can do mkdir and then, here it's in your home directory creating test-repo, and then navigate to this new directory using cd. And then what you can do is, you can initialize a local get repository by using the command get init, if you've installed get, as we've talked about previously in our previous lectures on Git, and then you can point your local repository to the remote repository. In other words, you can link up your local repository with the remote GitHub repository by typing git remote add origin, and then the URL of the remote repository that you created on GitHub. Now you've linked up your local copy with your remote version of GitHub. So, what you can do is, you can actually, here's what it looks like in action. So this is actually a re-creating a repo and then cd'ing that repo and then setting it up so it's connected to the remote version of that repo as well. So, another thing that you can do is fork another user's repository or repo. And so, the idea here is that what you want to be able to do is develop software with other people. So, they'll have repos that they've already created that are on GitHub. Once you find one of those that you're interested in, you can go to the, that repository and then you can click the Fork button, and so what the Fork button will do is, it will create a copy of that repo as it currently is situated in your GitHub profile. So now you have it on your GitHub account. And so, you can make a local copy, so you can clone the repo down to your compu, computer by using the command. Git clone, and that will take your local version of your, or sorry, the remote version of your repo and clone it down to your computer It will, if you use the command like this it will clone to your current working directory. And then what you can do is you can actually work on that and try to contribute back to the repo, with and hope that they'll use the changes that you made. If you made changes to your local copy, you'll want to push your changes to GitHub. You may be interested in staying current with the changes using your forked copy. We'll cover some more of the Git and GitHub basics in coming lectures, but, really the basic, the best place to find all this sort of information is to look at these tutorials right here both on GitHub and on the Git website which gives you a lot of information about how you Fork and clone and all the other components of using GitHub.
