Navigating a GitHub Repository - Part 2

This is video #4 in the Data School series, "Introduction to Git and GitHub." Relevant links and the full transcript are below. Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5-da3qGB5IBLMp7LtN8Nc3Efd4hJq0kD

== LET'S CONNECT! ==

Blog: http://www.dataschool.io
Newsletter: http://www.dataschool.io/subscribe/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/justmarkham
GitHub: https://github.com/justmarkham

== LINKS RELATED TO THIS VIDEO ==

GitHub repository for ggplot2: https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2

== TRANSCRIPT ==

In this video, we're going to navigate other basic features of a GitHub repository.

If you click on "Commits", you can see the commit history for the repo. A commit is a set of one or more changes made to one or more files. Each commit has a comment explaining the commit, and you can click on the comment to see the actual changes.

When you go back to the main page, note that the text here is actually the comment from the most recent commit to that file or folder, and the date of that commit. It's not a description of that file or folder.

Next let's click on "Issues". Issues is a system for tracking bugs or other problems with that repo. Anyone can submit an issue.

Now let's go to "Pull Requests". This will make more sense once we have talked about forks, but basically, a Pull Request is when a contributor (Tony in this case) has made changes to the ggplot2 code, and they are requesting that the repo owner pull those changes into the repository.

Next is "Branches". I'm not going to explain why branches are used, but I'll just say that for a simple repository, there is often only one branch, and it's called "master" by default.

Next is "Contributors". These are everyone who has ever contributed to this repository.

As for "Forking", we'll get to that in the next video. "Starring" is like favoriting a repo, and "Watching" is similar to starring.

Finally, let's leave the repo and go to Hadley's profile page. This is his summary page, showing his most popular repos and his contributions across GitHub. If you click on repos, you can see all of his repos, the language they were written in, the commit activity in the form of a graph, and the number of stars and number of forks.