GitHub is a hosted platform for distributed version control. Beyond version controll, GitHub provides a social platform where open science and open source software developers work together to solve a range of technical and scientific problems. At CarbonPlan, we make extensive use of GitHub to coordinate software development activities across the organization and to openly share tools, data, and other resources.
There are many tutorials (i.e. here or here) that walk new users through the process of learning GitHub. Rather than repeat those tutorials, we briefly layout some of most central concepts utilized at CarbonPlan.
GitHub Organizations are shared accounts that allow organizations, like CarbonPlan, collaborate on multiple projects at once. CarbonPlan's GitHub organization (https://github.com/carbonplan) is the central development location for all of our data-science and front-end projects. Important featurs at the organization level include:
Issues are an important tool for organizing projets. They allow us to track ideas, feature requests, and bug reports on individual projects and they support cross-project references allowing us to connet conversions across multiple projects.
Pull Requests propose changes to a project and provide an interface for discussing technical implementation details (often refered to as code review).
In the Git version controll system, each repository can include multiple branches. Branches allow a project to have multiple development tracks open at the same time. Git (and GitHub) provide tooling for merging changes in from two branches after a period of development.
At CarbonPlan, we typically define the main branch as the main development track. Feature additions and bug fixes typically use descriptive branch names such as feature/foo-support or fix/foo-bug. This tutorial does a great job explaining how branches fit into the overall Git flow.
GitHub provides a continuous integration service called GitHub Actions. Most of CarbonPlan's GitHub repositories use GitHub Actions for either testing or deployment. See the front-end or data-science testing sections for more details on configuring GitHub actions for various project types.