Support Protips

Whether you are new to software development or a senior developer, chances are that you've used or contributed to an Open Source Software project. In this article, we'll give a brief overview of best contribution practices and share a few tips to help your favorite OSS projects and maintainers.

Licenses are a crucial part of open source software development. All code that you interact with is influenced by the terms of that project's chosen license. Below, we'll cover the basics -- key terms, licenses most commonly used, and the questions you should ask when deciding on a license for your own work.

Are you frustrated because your bug reports don't get fixed or are misunderstood? Learn how you can get things fixed quicker by framing software issues in an understandable and actionable way.

GitHub Support receives a variety of reports ranging in type, frequency, and quality every day. While our approach isn't the only one, we're sharing how we think in the hopes that it will help you write your next report, for GitHub.com or for a project you're working on.

Branch protection is part of a powerful set of configuration options that give repository administrators the ability to enforce security policies by preventing accidental branch deletions, enforcing code reviews, and requiring successful automated checks before pull requests can be merged. This article will explore best practices to help you maintain a healthy codebase without impairing collaboration. 

Protecting your digital privacy can be an overwhelming task, but the following tips and insights may help you better understand, and take control of, your privacy on GitHub.

Organization administrators want to provide their users the best possible collaborative experience while meeting their security requirements and limiting their maintenance effort. Here's what we at GitHub have found to be the best practices for organizations.

We recommend that files be kept under 100MB and repositories be kept under 1GB. Discover your options for working on GitHub when your project exceeds these limits.

Harness the power of GitHub's search functionality to find exactly what you need in repositories, project code, issues, pull requests, and more!

Project boards make it easier to manage your tasks on GitHub. Learn best practices for using project boards to coordinate work with your team and keep track of your personal to-do list.

It's not possible for more than one repository in the same network—like a fork and its parent or two forks of the same repository—to be owned by the same account. Discover the best alternative workflow for your situation.

Each commit on GitHub is associated with three people: its author, its committer, and its pusher. Learn how these roles are different and what to do if any one of them looks wrong.

Are you a new GitHub user looking to get started with GitHub Desktop? Here are some common questions you can read through to make sure you get the most out of using GitHub Desktop.

GitHub recommends using only one user account to manage both personal and professional repositories. Here are some tips for making the most of this arrangement.

Whether you're just getting started on GitHub or you're already a prominent open source contributor, you should take steps to ensure your account is protected against unauthorized access. 

Pull requests are the best way to suggest changes to a repository. These best practices from the Support Team will help authors and maintainers create, review, merge, and manage pull requests easily and effectively.

In part three of this series, we walked through setting up your GitHub Pages site locally with Jekyll. If you've followed along this far: congrats! You now have a themed and fully-functioning GitHub Pages site and the ability to work on it locally. Great! Let's use our new found ability to work locally and customize our Pages site a bit.

GitHub is most powerful when you use it to collaborate with others. We'll send you notifications to make this collaboration easier, keeping you updated on activities and conversations that involve or interest you. Read some tips for making your notifications as helpful as possible.

Each year, millions of people make resolutions to improve their lives. Maybe you were one of them. Maybe you decided you wanted to use Git and GitHub for your New Year's resolution. Well, if like me, you have been slacking on getting started on your resolution, this article is going to be perfect.

In part three of the Getting Started with GitHub Pages mini-series, we walk you through cloning your GitHub Pages site to your computer and using the GitHub Pages gem to build and test your site locally.

Part 2 of the Getting Started with GitHub Pages mini-series walks you through adding one of GitHub's offical themes to the GitHub Pages site we began working on in the last part of this series. If you haven't yet completed the steps in the previous guide, you'll want to do that before we begin.

Check out this article for an overview of both forking and cloning, so you can choose the best method for working with your repositories on GitHub.

As a newcomer to Open Source projects or GitHub repositories, the term fork might seem very foreign to you. Last time you checked, you were trying to contribute to a project, not pick an eating utensil.

GitHub Pages is GitHub's static site publishing platform. In addition to supporting regular HTML content, GitHub Pages is deeply integrated with Jekyll, a popular static site generator designed for blogging and software documentation. And that's not all! GitHub Pages sites are used for everything from blogs to full blown sites.

We're going to talk about more complex GitHub Pages sites as we work through this series. For right now, we're going to work through the simplest way to use GitHub Pages: publishing a single Markdown file.

It can be frustrating to realize that hours of hard work are missing from your contributions graph and difficult to determine why. This article contains a few questions to ask yourself to ensure that all your commits are in your graph.