Use GitHub for WordPress development - Beginner's guide

With over 40 million users and more than 140 million repositories, GitHub is the largest host for developers.

Do you know why it is so popular among developers? How can it help you in your development journey?

Read on below to know what exactly it is and what power you can obtain through GitHub to streamline the development journey.

Since we are talking about WordPress development, we will cover how a newbie WordPress developer can get benefit from GitHub, all in a simplified way. Also, we will introduce you to GitHub, one of the most powerful open-source communities of developers.

What is GitHub?

It’s a free hosting service that lets developers and programmers upload the source code and connect with each other.

It provides you with the system to upload and share the project and where other users can make changes, add to the code, provide suggestions, tweak the program, without affecting the project. And proposed suggestions can be applied to the final version when they are approved.

It is the best platform where you can learn and help others at the same time.

Now we will walk you through the applications of GitHub that will assist you in making the best use of this extremely powerful community of technophiles in your WordPress development journey.

Github for WordPress Development

Assuming, you have a WordPress website or a blog, and you make changes frequently on your website. Sometimes things don’t go as expected, enforcing you to work again on finding what's gone wrong during the development.

GitHub helps you in collaborating with developers where you can seek help and contribute as well.

With GitHub’s ‘version control’ you not only switch effortlessly to the working version of the project, but also you can get help from many geeks around the world.

** So, what is version control in GitHub?**

Among many powerful tools, GitHub provides a "version control" system which is one of the best tools which allows you to keep track of the changes made over the period of time at the source level.

So, in case the latest version doesn't work accordingly, you or team members can go back to the previous versions, comparing the code of the new version with that of the previous ones to find out what has gone wrong.

When working on a WordPress development project, it is exhausting to create backups, uploading the tweaked code to check if it is working well, and repeating this process again and again.

In GitHub, you can remotely push content from your local computer to a wide range of developers in a bid to seek help from them, making it available to use or tweak for a multitude of users.

How to use it for WordPress Development?

Assuming, you own a WordPress website and you want to connect it with the GitHub repository. Below are the steps to use GitHub for WordPress.

Let’s say you are working on WordPress theme development and you want to push the files to the Git repository and also want to pull it on your local machine when required.

Step 1: Create Repository

• Go to the GitHub login page or create a new account
• Click on start a project and start creating a repository
• Give the name to your project and set the control (if it set to public, your project will be visible to anyone on the internet), make it public so others can review and contribute to your project
• Bingo! You have successfully created a new repository.

Step 2: Install WordPress on your System

There are various methods to set up WordPress in a local environment, it is better to opt for applications made for WordPress installation that will make this process plain-sailing, which might be complex if you try to on your own.

Go through this guide to set up a WordPress development environment on your computer. The installation process may vary from one application to another. You can look for the installation guide on their help page.

Step 3: Installing Git on your local machine

The installation process differs from one OS to another. Read here a guide to install Git on your local machine.

Open the terminal and run the following command to check whether it is installed or not.

$ git --version

In case, Git is installed on your system it will show you a version number, otherwise an error; 'git' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Step 4: Creating a Local Repository

Use the following command to access the folder which contains your WordPress development file:

cd /Users/your-name/folder-name/Websites/folder-name/wp-content/theme/theme-name

Replace the folders’ names with yours where the WordPress file is located.

Now use this command to create a git repository on your system:

git init

Once you create a repository, the next step is to add files to it. This can be accomplished using the following command:

git add filename

So far, you have added new files and made changes in the repository, therefore, you need to use the commit command in order to track all the changes during the development from the starting of the project.

git commit -m "adding files"

Step 5: Push the Files to GitHub Repositories

Now you want to push the changes you made to the local repository to the GitHub repository. Open the command terminal and run the following:

git remote add origin https://github.com/rusername/your-repo-name.git

git push -u origin master

Replace the username, and your-repo-name accordingly to upload the committed files.

Conclusion

Pushing your projects to open-source communities is the best way to get aid and involvement in development projects through such platforms ensures that the application you or your team working on has been thoroughly reviewed by a wide range of developers.

This process makes you develop a top-notch project with less effort and the best thing is you don’t have to invest a single penny.

In this article, we have introduced you to GitHub and explained the way how you can use it on a local machine.