GitHub

Now that you’ve put your project under version control with Git, it’s time to push your code up to GitHub, a social code site optimized for hosting and sharing Git repositories. Putting a copy of your Git repository at GitHub serves two purposes: It’s a full backup of your code (including the full history of commits), and it makes any future collaboration much easier. This step is optional, but being a GitHub member will open the door to participating in a wide variety of open-source projects.

             Figure 1.6 Creating the first app repository at GitHub.

GitHub has a variety of paid plans, but for open-source code their services are free, so sign up for a free GitHub account if you don’t have one already. (You might have to follow the GitHub tutorial on creating SSH keys first.) After signing up, click on the link to create a repository and fill in the information as in Figure 1.6. (Take care not to initialize the repository with a README file, as rails new creates one of those automatically.) After submitting the form, push up your first application as follows:

 
These commands tell Git that you want to add GitHub as the origin for your main (master) branch and then push your repository up to GitHub. (Don’t worry about what the -u flag does; if you’re curious, do a web search for ‘‘git set upstream’’.) Of course,