Using GitHub for IT purposes

What can IT use GitHub for?

GitHub allows you to create, store, change, merge, and collaborate on files or code. Any member of a team can access the GitHub repository (think of this as a folder for files) and see the most recent version in real-time. Then, they can make edits or changes that the other collaborators also see. The files can be source code for applications or scripts being created or maintained by the Team or simply configuration files or build steps used to setup and administer a service or application.

Why do I need to use GitHub?

Simple answer is version control. Version control is important as it makes collaboration more transparent and reproducible. By visibly tracking iterative changes, you and your Team can experiment with new approaches knowing that you can revert to the original as needed or keep track of changes to a service over time.

How to securely leverage GitHub?

Syracuse University IT users of GitHub should ensure that they enable the highest level of security to protect the information they are storing in GitHub. The way to do that is to enable the use of "Passkeys" to login to GitHub. Many of the IT users on campus already possess a physical FIDO2 complaint "Passkey" device in the form of their YubiKey Smartcard and it can be used as the physical "Passkey" device for GitHub. Learn More

Can I use GitHub to make tasks easier to accomplish?

GitHub has GitHub Actions that allow for automation and Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to be used with your Team's repositories. Learn More

How to get started

Create a GitHub Team

Create a GitHub Repository

Additional Information

GitHub Desktop

GitHub Desktop is a free, open-source application that helps you to work with code hosted on GitHub or other Git hosting services. With GitHub Desktop, you can perform Git commands, such as committing and pushing changes, in a graphical user interface, rather than using the command line. Learn More

File Paths

The location of files and their pathing may be important to being able to collaborate with others on your team using GitHub. It is recommended that the team choose a standard location on the file system that repositories are cloned to.

For example, a team may choose to clone all repositories to the path "C:\Users\<username>\Apps-SU\Git\". By being consistent across collaborators linking of source files into other repositories or files will always result in the same relative path. Also, in most source code it is easy to use a variable to reference the <username> value and therefore make sure that the even full paths to files are usable by all the collaborators.