Can't Figure Out How To Use GitHub To Submit Projects

[Josh641]

Hello there to whoever is reading! I am done with my second project in Responsive Web Design, and now want to submit it. I submitted my tribute page by Codepen, but this time, I want to submit it using GitHub. However, I can’t figure out how to submit it start to finish. I have tried to find out how but failed to do so. So now my question is, how do I submit my projects start to finish using GitHub? Thank you for your time, and let me know if anything is needed!

[kevinSmith]

Github is doable, but it is more complicated. Codepen provides access to the code and the live app. With github, you can provide access to the code but not the live app. They do have gitpages where you can host a live app, but you’d probably want to create folders there because you will have more than one project. You could also put a link at the bottom of the app to provide access to the code if you wanted.

[bradtaniguchi]

Its possible, but it can get complicated.

So first, some background on the technologies you are wanting to use.

• github is an online service that primarily provides online hosting of version control. This means you can use github to backup/share/keep-track of your version control history of your project. It also provides other services that may be of use (I’ll get into the main one)

• git is a tool/software that is used for version control. git is the tool that will keep track of changes you make to your work over time, allowing you to go through your project’s history. It interfaces with github, allowing you to “upload” and “download” changes to github, but generally git works offline.

• github pages is a static web hosting service provided by github that allows you to host static web content (like a website) that is “loaded” from github itself. This is a free service, but has its own cavets. As its static hosting, there is no back-end and minimal operational control over how its hosted. It could be used to submit projects for.

So with the technologies out of the way, the way you’d submit your projects is using all three together to get the project into github pages. This means you use git to keep track of your project, push it to github and then leverage the github pages feature with your repo to get it “hosted” and available to submit to freeCodeCamp. There are a few guides on getting that going, which I wont get into because it can get rather complicated. Things get even more complicated depending on how your project is setup, something like using React means you need a build-step, and can’t use the main (or master) branch which means the entire process gets more complicated!

The simplest alternative is what Kevin said, which is to just use something else rather than jumping through all these hoops to use git, github and github pages.

Later you can learn how to use github pages to show off your projects, but you’ll want to get more familar with the other technologies mentioned (git and github) before trying out the github pages features.

[Josh641]

Thanks for the help! I decided to use repl instead. It took a bit for it to work, but now it has!

[Josh641]

Thanks for the advice!

[kpav]

Hello,

I understand that you have decided to use Replit instead, but I will give you a brief guide, how you could submit and publish your projects on your GitHub instead. The described way is not the only possible way to do this, it’s just how I did it.

1. If you are using Windows you first need to install Windows Subsystem for Linux (I am assuming here you are using Windows). This is a video I recommend you watch it in its entirety and use it as your guide to get your basic setup done.
2. Next go through this article that explains how to push new projects to GitHub (There is nothing special about this article in particular you could use any other guide you might find online if you Google this topic).
3. If you haven’t encountered any problems, at this point you should have your project’s code published inside of a repository on your GitHub. Only thing to do now is to publish your project to GitHub pages. Read through this Medium article (the relevant part for you here is the part that is subtitled as Publishing/Deploying an existing repo).

This is a really short and rough guide that will guide you to what you want to achieve. I apologize if it is a bit too concise, I don’t have the time at the moment to make a more in depth one. If you will need any help with the set up you can message me and I will try to help you out.

I know that using Git and GitHub can be really confusing at the beginning, but I really like it now and I think it is a useful skill to have. Also sometime in the future, when you get to the frontend projects you will notice that you will no longer be able to deploy your projects to GitHub pages in a way that it is described here. When you get to that point, I suggest you use this guide, if you will be working with React on your projects (this is the guide I use right now, when I want to deploy one of my projects to GitHub Pages).