What makes GIT and GitHub powerful is the ease with which third parties can fork a GIT repo, work on the code independently and then offer up a ‘pull request’ which allows the core GIT repository maintainer to accept back changes into the core repository.

It’s how we’re managing the GIT repo ourselves – there are only one or two people in the company that have the rights to push changes into the core repository – most people do their own changes in forks of the main repo.  That gives everyone a sandbox to develop independently in but gives some control to do quality assurance before accepting contributions into the main repository.

It’s easy to do

Step 1 – Create an Account on GitHub

Goto http://www.github.com/

It’s easy to put in a unique username and password in and your email address.

Then go

https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-web-apps

And click on the Fork icon up in the top right corner.

You should see some fun graphics creating a fork.  At the end you should have your own repository like this:

• https://github.com/eliotmuir/iguana-web-apps

Now the next step is to click on the “Clone in Desktop” icon.

This will prompt you to install the GitHub tools.  What you see will vary depending on the operating system – there is a Windows and an OS X version of this GUI tool.  Here’s a shot of the mac one:

Install the GitHub application, then you can put your GitHub username and password into the application set up:

Once you are logged in you can skip the next dialog:

At the end of it you’ll have GIT installed and you should be able to have a local GIT repo of your own forked repo that you can work with.  Next time someone asks us a question about this I can give a mini tutorial on using the GIT command line which is very good.