For our web maps to be sharable in the web, we’ll need to store and publish them online. In this workshop, we will use GitHub’s web hosting feature called Pages.
Create a Free GitHub Account
GitHub is a platform for managing software and code development projects, and for building a community of practice for open source tools and software. At the core of GitHub is the version control system Git. Git is a widely used version control system that tracks changes to a group of files, referred to as a repository. We won’t be focusing on learning Git or GitHub for this workshop and previous experience is not required. However, Git and GitHub are essential tools for anyone hoping to learn code and manage application development projects – such as building web maps! If you would like to learn more about these tools, there are many resources online, such as:
- Software Carpentry’s Version Control with Git Workshop
- The Coding Train’s Git and GitHub for Poets YouTube Playlist
To Do
- Go to github.com/signup and create an account.
- Verify your account using the email you signed up with
- Sign into your account using your new credentials.
- From your GitHub account dashboard, click **_Create repository_** to create a new repository.
- Give your repository a name (LoveDataWeek-Web-Maps, for example)
- Select “Add a README file” and click the green Create repository button to accept the rest of the defaults.
Note the format of the URL: https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY-NAME.
After creating your new repository you should see your blank repo dashboard.
