GitHub Desktop is an open source -based GitHub app. It is written in and uses. Where can I get it? Download the official installer for your operating system:. There are several community-supported package managers that can be used to install Github Desktop.
Windows users can install using package manager: c: choco install github-desktop. macOS users can install using package manager: $ brew cask install github. Arch Linux users can install the latest version from the. You can install this alongside your existing GitHub Desktop for Mac or GitHub Desktop for Windows application. NOTE: there is no current migration path to import your existing repositories into the new application - you can drag-and-drop your repositories from disk onto the application to get started. Beta Channel Want to test out new features and get fixes before everyone else?
Install the beta channel to get access to early builds of Desktop:. Is GitHub Desktop right for me? What are the primary areas of focus?
Describes the focus of GitHub Desktop and who the product is most useful for. And to see what the team is working on currently and in the near future, check out the. I have a problem with GitHub Desktop Note: The applies in all interactions relating to the GitHub Desktop project. First, please search the and to see if your issue hasn't already been reported (it may also be fixed).
Oct 1, 2018 - GitHub is one of the most popular online services for hosting Git repositories. In this SVN tutorial, we look at what the GitHub Desktop app has.
There is also a list of that are being tracked against Desktop, and some of these issues have workarounds. If you can't find an issue that matches what you're seeing, open a, choose the right template and provide us with enough information to investigate further. The issue I reported isn't fixed yet. What can I do? If nobody has responded to your issue in a few days, you're welcome to respond to it with a friendly ping in the issue. Please do not respond more than a second time if nobody has responded. The GitHub Desktop maintainers are constrained in time and resources, and diagnosing individual configurations can be difficult and time consuming.
While we'll try to at least get you pointed in the right direction, we can't guarantee we'll be able to dig too deeply into any one person's issue. How can I contribute to GitHub Desktop? The document will help you get setup and familiar with the source. The folder also contains more resources relevant to the project. If you're looking for something to work on, check out the label. More Resources See for more product-oriented information about GitHub Desktop.
License The MIT license grant is not for GitHub's trademarks, which include the logo designs. GitHub reserves all trademark and copyright rights in and to all GitHub trademarks. GitHub's logos include, for instance, the stylized Invertocat designs that include 'logo' in the file title in the following folder:. GitHub® and its stylized versions and the Invertocat mark are GitHub's Trademarks or registered Trademarks. When using GitHub's logos, be sure to follow the GitHub.
Keep current with the latest trends in technical communication by subscribing to the I'd Rather Be Writing newsletter. 4,500+ subscribers Although most developers use the command line when working with version control systems, there are many GUI clients available that can potentially simplify the process. GUI clients might be especially helpful when you’re trying to see what has changed in a file since the GUI can quickly highlight and indicate the changes taking place. Follow a typical workflow with a GitHub project using GitHub Desktop In this tutorial, you’ll use GitHub Desktop to manage the Git workflow. Rather than working in a GitHub wiki (as you did in the ), you’ll work in a regular Git repository. This is because GitHub wikis have some limitations when it comes to making pull requests.
To set up your Git repo using the GitHub Desktop client:. First, download and install. Launch the app and sign in. (You should already have a GitHub account from, but if not, create one.). Go to and browse to the repository you created in the, but not the wiki. Just go to the main repo.
(If you didn’t do the previous activity, just create a new repository.). While viewing your GitHub repo in the browser, click Clone or download and select Open in Desktop. Open in GitHub Desktop.
Open GitHub Desktop client and go to File Clone Repository. In the confirmation dialog, select Open GitHub Desktop.app. GitHub Desktop should launch with a “Clone a Repository” dialog box about where to clone the repository. If desired, you can change the Local Path. Click the URL tab, and then paste in the clone URL. In the Local Path field, select where you want the repo cloned. For example: Selecting paths for the repo in GitHub Desktop.
Click Clone. Go into the repository where GitHub Desktop cloned the repo (use your Finder or browse the folders with Finder or Explorer) and either add a simple text file with some content or make a change to an existing file. Go back to GitHub Desktop. You’ll see the new file you added in the list of uncommitted changes on the left. Uncommitted changes shown In the list of changed files, the green + means you’ve added a new file.
A yellow circle means you’ve modified an existing file. In the lower-left corner of the GitHub Desktop client (where it says “Summary” and “Description”), type a commit message, and then click Commit to master. When you commit the changes, the left pane no longer shows the list of uncommitted changes. However, you’ve committed the changes only locally. You still have to push the commit to the remote (origin) repository. (“origin” is the alias name that refers to the remote repository.).
Click Push origin at the top. You’ll see GitHub Desktop show that it’s “Pushing to origin.” If you view your repository online, you’ll see that the change you made has been pushed to the master branch on origin. You can also click the History tab in the GitHub Desktop client (instead of the Changes tab), or go to View Show History to see the changes you previously committed.
Although I prefer to use the terminal instead of the GitHub Desktop GUI, the GUI gives you an easier visual experience to see the changes made to a repository. You can use both the command line and Desktop client in combination, if you want. Create a branch Now let’s create a branch, make some changes, and see how the changes are specific to that branch.
In the GitHub Desktop client, go to Branch New Branch and create a new branch. Call it “development” branch, and click Create Branch. Creating a new branch When you create the branch, you’ll see the Current branch drop-down menu indicate that you’re working in that branch.
Creating a branch copies the existing content (from the branch you’re currently in, master) into the new branch ( development). Working in a branch. Using Finder or Explorer, browse to the file you created earlier and make a change to it, such as adding a new line with some text. Save the changes. Return to GitHub Desktop and notice that on the Changes tab, you have new modified files. New files modified The file changes show deleted lines in red and new lines in green.
The colors help you see what changed. Commit the changes using the options in the lower-left corner, and click Commit to development. Click Publish branch (on the top of the GitHub Desktop window) to make the local branch also available on origin (GitHub).
(Remember, there are usually two versions of a branch — the local version and the remote version.). Switch back to your master branch (using the Branch drop-down option at the top of the GitHub Desktop client). Then look at your file (in your text editor, such as Sublime text).
Note how the file changes you made while editing in the development branch don’t appear in your master branch. You usually create a new branch when you’re making extensive changes to your content. For example, suppose you want to revamp a section (“Section X”) in your docs. However, you might want to publish other updates before publishing the extensive changes in Section X. If you were working in the same branch, it would be difficult to selectively push updates on a few files outside of Section X without pushing updates you’ve made to files in Section X as well. Through branching, you can confine your changes to a specific version that you don’t push live until you’re ready to merge the changes into your master branch.
Merge the development branch into master Now let’s merge the development branch into the master branch. In the GitHub Desktop client, switch to the branch you want to merge the development branch into.
From the branch selector, select the master branch. Go to Branch Merge into Current Branch. In the merge window, select the development branch, and then click Merge development into master. Merging into master If you look at your changed file, you should see the changes in the master branch. Then click Push origin to push the changes to origin. You will now see the changes reflected on the file on GitHub. Merge the branch through a pull request Now let’s merge the development branch into the master using a pull request workflow.
We’ll pretend that we’ve cloned a repo managed by engineers, and we want to have the engineers merge in the development branch. (In other words, we might not have rights to merge branches into the master.) To do this, we’ll create a pull request. Just as you did in the previous section, switch to the development branch, make some updates to the content in a file, and then save and commit the changes. After committing the changes, click Push origin to push your changes to the remote version of the development branch on GitHub. In the GitHub Desktop client, while you have development branch selected, go to Branch Create Pull Request. GitHub opens in the browser with the Pull Request form opened. Pull request The left-facing arrow (pointing from the development branch towards the master) indicates that the pull request (“PR”) wants to merge the development branch into the master branch.
Describe the pull request, and then click Create pull request. At this point, engineers would get an email request asking for them to merge in the edits.
Play the part of the engineer by going to the Pull requests tab (on GitHub) to examine and confirm the merge request. As long as the merge request doesn’t pose any conflicts, you’ll see a Merge pull request button.
Confirm merge request. To see what changes you’re merging into master, you can click the Files changed tab (which appears on the secondary navigation bar near the top). Then click Merge pull request to merge in the branch, and click Confirm merge to complete the merge. Now let’s get the updates you merged into the masterbranch online into your local copy. In your GitHub Desktop GUI client, select the master branch, and then click the Fetch origin button. Fetch gets the latest updates from origin but doesn’t update your local working copy with the changes.
After you click Fetch origin, the button changes to Pull Origin. Click Pull Origin to update your local working copy with the fetched updates. Now check your files and notice that the updates that were originally in the development branch now appear in master.
For a more detailed tutorial in making pull requests using the GitHub interface, see. I include an extensive tutorial with pull requests because it will likely be a common workflow if you are. Managing merge conflicts Suppose you make a change on your local copy of a file in the repository, and someone else changes the same file using the online GitHub.com browser interface. The changes conflict with each other. What happens? When you click Push origin from the GitHub Desktop client, you’ll see a message saying that the repository has been updated since you last pulled: “The repository has been updated since you last pulled. Try pulling before pushing.” The button that previously said “Push origin” now says “Pull origin.” Click Pull origin.
You now get another error message that says, “We found some conflicts while trying to merge. Please resolve the conflicts and commit the changes.” If you decide to commit your changes, you’ll see a message that says: “Please resolve all conflicted files, commit, and then try syncing again.” The GitHub Desktop client displays an exclamation mark next to files with merge conflicts. Open up a conflict file and look for the conflict markers ( ). For example, you might see this. This is an edit I made locally. Now you need to re-add the file to Git again.
In the GitHub Desktop client, commit your changes to the updated files. Then click Push origin. The updates on your local get pushed to the remote without any more conflicts. Conclusion The more you use GitHub, the more familiar you’ll become with the workflows you need.
Git is a robust, powerful collaboration platform, and there are many commands and workflows and features that you could adopt for a variety of scenarios. Despite Git’s variety of commands and workflows, most likely the scenarios you’ll actually use are somewhat limited in scope and learnable without too much effort. Pretty soon, these workflows will become automatic. Although we’ve been using the GitHub Desktop client for this exercise, you can do all of this through the command line, and you’ll probably find it preferable that way. However, the GitHub Desktop client can be a good starting point as you transition into becoming more of a Git power user.