GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects that use the Git revision control system. According to the Git User’s Survey in 2008, GitHub is the most popular Git hosting site.
GitHub is written in Ruby on Rails by Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner.
Why GitHub ?
- It offers both commercial plans and free accounts for open source projects.
- The site provides social networking functionality like feeds, followers and the network graph to display how developers work on their versions of a repository.
- GitHub also operates a pastebin-style site at gist.github.com, wikis for the individual repositories and web pages that can be edited through a git repository.
In a latest talk at Yahoo on 2009-07-27, team members announced :
The numbers have risen to 90,000 unique public repositories, of which 10,000 in the last month; 12,000 have been forked at least once, for a total of 135,000 repositories.
The official website of GitHub claimes
Git is a fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software.
GitHub is the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, monitor development, all with ease.
