GitHub for Teams

About this course

This course is the team half of Git. You take what you know about commits and branches onto GitHub and learn how a real team shares, reviews, plans, checks and ships code: remotes and safe login, pull requests and code review, branching strategies and releases, issues and Projects, GitHub Actions for continuous integration, and secure deployment with environments, OIDC and least-privilege permissions. It ends with the detective skills that answer "when did this change, and why?" with blame, the pickaxe and git bisect.

It belongs to both the Full-Stack Developer and the Product Manager paths, so every lesson keeps two readers in mind. Developers build everything for real, from a ruleset and a linted CI workflow to a hotfix with cherry-pick and a scripted bisect. Product managers learn to read a pull request in ten minutes from its description and file list, write one-line release notes and triage rules, and read a red check without having to fix the code.

Every lesson is set at Mangrove Market, a fictional grocery chain with about 320 stores, a Store app on handheld scanners and a Partner app used by 1,800 corner shops, where you play a new team member. Each lesson has diagrams, quick checks, a Build-it section with real commands and real outputs, practice tasks with one exercise auto-checked in your browser, flashcards and a podcast episode. The course ends with a capstone project and a final exam for a free certificate.

What you will be able to do

• Push, pull and recover from a rejected push without losing anyone's work, with SSH or token login set up safely
• Write, review and merge pull requests, route reviews with CODEOWNERS, and read any PR as a PM from its description and file list
• Choose a branching strategy, protect main with a ruleset, and ship releases and hotfixes with tags, semantic versions and cherry-pick
• Plan work with issue forms, labels and a GitHub Project whose cards move themselves when pull requests merge
• Write, lint and debug a CI workflow, then deploy through staging and an approval gate with OIDC and least-privilege permissions
• Trace a line of code back to its commit, PR and issue, and find the commit that broke something with git bisect

Syllabus

7 stops, about 4 h in total. Each stop fills in when you complete the lesson.

1. 1

   GitHub: remotes, clone, push, pull and authentication

   A repository on one laptop helps one person. GitHub gives your team one shared copy, and Git keeps yours and the shared one in step with a few commands. This lesson shows what a remote really is, what fetch, pull and push each move, how to log in safely, and how to handle the most common error: a rejected push.

   35 minBeginnerEpisode1 exercise

   Git remotesPush and pullGitHub authentication

2. 2

   Pull requests and code review

   A pull request is where your team decides, together, that a change is safe to ship. This lesson shows what a PR is made of, how to write one that gets a fast yes, how to review well, what each merge button does to history, and how a PM can read a PR in ten minutes without reading every line.

   35 minIntermediateEpisode1 exercise

   Pull requestsCode reviewReading a PR as a PM

3. 3

   Branching strategies, releases and versions

   How a team uses branches decides how often it can ship and how calmly it can fix a bug in the busiest week of the year. This lesson compares the three common strategies, shows how rulesets turn your agreements into rules GitHub enforces, and walks through tags, releases, version numbers and a hotfix from start to finish.

   35 minIntermediateEpisode1 exercise

   Branching strategyRelease managementSemantic versioning

4. 4

   Planning on GitHub: issues, labels and Projects

   GitHub can hold the plan right next to the code: issues for each piece of work, labels and fields to sort them, and Projects boards that update themselves when pull requests merge. This lesson shows how the pieces connect, and how to decide what to plan on GitHub and what to keep in Jira or Notion.

   30 minBeginnerEpisode1 exercise

   Issue trackingBug triageGitHub Projects

5. 5

   GitHub Actions: continuous integration

   Every pull request on your team is checked by a robot before a person reviews it. This lesson opens up that robot: what triggers it, where it runs, how jobs and steps fit together, how caching and secrets work, and how to read a red X. Then you write a complete CI workflow for a TypeScript project and lint it.

   40 minIntermediateEpisodeSimulator1 exercise

   GitHub ActionsContinuous integrationReading CI failures

6. 6

   Deploying and securing with GitHub Actions

   CI checks code. CD ships it, and to ship it the workflow needs a key to your servers or cloud. This lesson shows how to deploy through staging and an approval gate to production, how to give a workflow short-lived access instead of a stored key, and the handful of settings that stop a workflow from becoming the easiest way to break into your systems.

   40 minAdvancedEpisode1 exercise

   CI/CD securityDeployment pipelinesLeast privilege

7. 7

   Reading code like a detective

   "When did this behaviour change, and why?" is one of the most useful questions a PM can answer alone. This lesson gives you the tools: how to find your way around an unfamiliar repository, search code across GitHub, follow a line back through blame to its commit, pull request and issue, search history with the pickaxe, and let git bisect find the commit that broke something.

   35 minIntermediateEpisode1 exercise

   Code archaeologyGit bisectCode search

8. Capstone: Put partner-api on a team workflow before the festival rush

   A realistic project with a rubric and a model answer.

9. Final exam and certificate

   10 questions drawn at random, 70% to pass.

Capstone project

Check what you know

Questions