You can now create files on GitHub

https://github.com/blog/1327-creating-files-on-github

by geetarista • 14 years ago

335 82 14 years ago

hardik988• 14 years ago

This is fantastic news. I think this qualifies Github as a complete blogging engine now, with the plethora of static site generators available.

thirdtruck• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've used it for a blog and a promotional site for a few months now.

swanson3• 14 years ago

Inside a Jekyll repo on Github:

    New file button = New Post (rich editor)
    Branch and new file = Draft
    Edit button (owner) = Edit
    Edit button (reader) = Submit correction
    Pull request = Submit Guest post
    Pull request comment = Copy/content editor
    Issues = Idea/Suggestion bucket
    Commit button = Publish and deploy

If there was a way to do the live markdown preview using the css (maybe you could inline link it?), then you have a pretty complete blog engine for hackers. This would be an awesome feature IMO.

Github would then be the place where you put your code, write your blog, track your issues, paste snippets for IRC (Gist), display your business card (profile info), and host your talk slides (SpeakerDeck). The next logical step to me would be integrating conferences/user groups (ala Lanyard/Meetup.com).

PS. @github feel free to hire me to help build it out :P

masklinn• 14 years ago

> If there was a way to do the live markdown preview using the css

Render in an iframe with the right CSS linked?

swanson3• 14 years ago

There are several ways; but I might ways using the current Github UI.

phleet• 14 years ago

Have you seen Prose? http://prose.io/about.html

swanson3• 14 years ago

Yep - it's the same concept. But native support on Github would be cooler IMO :)

And I believe it has the same issue with live preview not using your own CSS

ZoFreX2• 14 years ago

I love this idea for Github and think it would be a really exciting move for them! One thought though - could the Git protocol† for editing, correcting, guest posts etc not also work well as a more general protocol for hacker bloggers?

Something like a meta tag on the index page for the blog, pointing to the git repository‡? (be it on Github, Bitbucket, or your own server) A simple command-line tool (or browser extension) would assist in checking out the repository, and you could issue the pull request with whatever communication protocols you have in common (no need to re-invent the wheel here).

† It needn't just be for git, of course - it could work with many (any?) distributed version control systems (Mercurial and Bazar spring to mind)

‡ I realise you may not necessarily want everyone to have access (even read-only) to your repository - for example, you may have future, draft posts in un-merged branches. The beauty of distributed version control is that there's no canonical server - so there's no reason the public one has to have any branch pushed to it other than master.

emillon• 14 years ago

There's a "rel=vcs-*" microformat :

http://joeyh.name/rfc/rel-vcs/

mikeevans• 14 years ago

How about a browser extension?

jfaucett• 14 years ago

This is a great new feature. Another thing this reminded me of is how good the github team is at releasing new features, clearly explaining them, and getting them integrated smoothly and across a wide user base. Its very impressive to me since this is rarely done well IMO.

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Finally! I often want to share small scripts and having to create a repository locally first is much less convenient than just pasting the file online.

briandoll• 14 years ago

Gist is great for that too: https://gist.github.com/

ZoFreX2• 14 years ago

It is! And once created, you can push and pull to and from gists just like any git repository :)

kgabis2• 14 years ago

Also this: https://github.com/ConradIrwin/jist

RDDavies• 14 years ago

This is really wonderful. Great for those of us who work from tablets frequently.

mminer• 14 years ago

Agreed. The ability to edit files from the browser made fixing website typos on-the-go trivial, and this gives even more power to developers whose current machine limits terminal access (Prompt on the iPad + a remote server works wonders, but too often I've had only a colleague's tablet or smartphone to work with).

Swizec• 14 years ago

This is awesome for drive-by commits of documentation and such. Marvelous.

nnnnnn• 14 years ago

Nice to see Github releasing more consumer features lately (deleting branches on merge, now creating files, etc). After not seeing a significant update for months, I thought Github forgot about the consumers in their more focused efforts towards enterprise users.

fishbacon• 14 years ago

This is awesome for a number of reasons.

The biggest is probably that you can now have people helping out without teaching them git. Like people helping with translation, they could just copy the original file and translate it locally, then paste it in to a new file. Way cool.

ios84dev• 14 years ago

Is it possible to disable this feature so that people can't randomly commit code to a core repo on a team?

38252• 14 years ago

I think that you have bigger problems if anyone anywhere has commit privileges to your repository. You must trust your commitors. Am I missing something?

damncabbage• 14 years ago

Have you tried switching to the fork-and-pull-request model instead of everyone directly committing to the main repo?

(It's how many, many open-source projects run, and GitHub has a good write-up of it here: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests )

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

Excellent timing. One of the elements on my TODO list was to add the Github API to my app to create files that I can then have the user edit. Now I can just use a link instead.

benaiah• 14 years ago

I get the feeling that the various "online IDE" projects may be quickly superseded. If anyone could pull that off, it's Github - just getting Github integration working is hit-and-miss with most of the others. If it could include some live preview functionality for HTML/CSS/JS for mockups and Markdown for writing, it would quickly become vastly useful.

Does anyone know what text editor they're using? I assume it's CodeMirror, but I could be wrong.

USSRLivesOn• 14 years ago

I believe the editor is ACE:

https://github.com/blog/905-edit-like-an-ace

https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace

CD1212• 14 years ago

I think it is a great decision on where to place the create new file button, it seems obvious when you see it but is such a simple solution. Or is it just me?

When I read their tweet I was interested to see how they had integrated it with everything else. Off the top of my head I couldn't think of an ideal place without the whole UX feeling clunky. Well done Github!

bitsweet• 14 years ago

Could this be the eventual IDE in the cloud so many others have failed at? Start with getting everyone's code in the system, get them viewing code in your system, commenting on commits daily, then "hey while you're here, why not just edit the file in this little editor"...fast forward several more iterations/improvements and then you find yourself never leaving the web editor.

sergiotapia• 14 years ago

What if the internet goes out?

kgabis2• 14 years ago

You could still use a local copy. DVCS rox.

speiler• 14 years ago

What if the power goes out? What if your main development PC goes down?

The question is really how often does this happen and how long is it out for. Personally I don't remember the last time my internet was out for more then an hour, and that wasn't even in the last year.

Google Docs must have the same problem, how do they mitigate it?

james33• 14 years ago

Cloud9 IDE is actually a very nice cloud-based editor that already hooks into Github and others.

scott_karana• 14 years ago

Can't upvote this enough. Quite a cool project, open source, runs on Node, and is very featureful.

maratd2• 14 years ago

I've been using it to write production code for almost 6 months now. Over the last month, they've eliminated all the minor annoyances. It's solid and works. I couldn't complain even if I wanted to. The codebase is also very approachable. I needed a feature, wrote it, pull request, and they accepted it.

spb2• 14 years ago

In fact, Ace (the Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor) is what Github uses for their file editing interface, so if you're editing files on the site directly, you're already using Cloud9, partially.

Flenser• 14 years ago

I had to use Cloud9 a few months ago to populate a new repo for a small project I wanted to share. With today's changes I wouldn't have needed to use Cloud9. Being able to add files is long overdue and I wonder how much it was to stem the tide of users using third party sites to populate github and thereby becoming entrenched in a development/publishing workflow that only used github as a storage layer and not somewhere where you would spend time or send others to the github website.

ivix• 14 years ago

mbed.org has been doing this successfully for a few years now. The difference is that it's a compact, tightly integrated IDE for a specific technology (C/C++ embedded development) rather than trying to solve everybody's problem.

And yes, we have integrated version control. Based on mercurial. :)

brendonjohn• 14 years ago

I most definitely agree. However I don't know how they would go about integrating the IDE while maintaining the healthy git workflow that many have come to love.

bryanh• 14 years ago

I bet it is very satisfying to just constantly ship cool new discrete features like this for a product like GitHub.

recursive• 14 years ago

I'm a little surprised by the unanimous positive response here. Usually any mention of a new GUI for any git functionality gets at least some negative feedback. I count this as progress!

eslaught3• 14 years ago

Sorry to be off topic, but does it bug anyone else that the language Github uses for their native client is "Clone in Mac" and "Setup in Windows", as if the name of their client is "Mac" and "Windows", etc. Not only is this confusing, because they're naming the product the same as the OS, but it's also a little insulting because it's almost like saying that the normal command-line Git client doesn't run well on those platforms.

I appreciate that they want to draw attention to their native client product, but I really wish they would give it a proper name so that they don't have use the name of the OS instead.

eagsalazar22• 14 years ago

YES! This drives me totally nuts because people using their clients never become knowledgeable about how git works making those people terrible to collaborate with. The vocabulary they teach them is just totally wrong.

goldfeld• 14 years ago

I think it's less about promoting their native client as it is about making Github (and Git) less daunting for command-line-evading users. Just so happens their own client is the most user friendly, but it could have been any other, hence not tying the benefit (cloning in the OS with a click) to the implementation.

rtomayko• 14 years ago

These buttons are only displayed for users who have installed those tools. We're not using it as advertisement, we're making it convenient for people who have already installed the tool.

eslaught3• 14 years ago

Are you sure about that? I do not have the tool installed (or anything like it, since I use command-line git), but I see the "Clone in Mac" button on every single github repo I view in my browser.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

I can't speak for Windows, but if I click "Clone in Mac", it launches Tower.app. So the label seems apt to me. It's more that the URL protocol that sounds wrong to me (github-mac://??).

eslaught3• 14 years ago

Thanks for mentioning. That does actually make it useful.

antirez3• 14 years ago

Github is the ultimate no-bullshit company. Any new announce is about some good feature or small improvement that matters: no annoying things to try to protect the company in some odd way, no greedy tactics to make more money in subtle ways. They are completely focused on their users and their product. I wish more tech companies could follow this example.

terhechte• 14 years ago

One of their advantages is that they're not dependent upon advertising money

antirez3• 14 years ago

Well, I guess they decided to follow this route. For example github receives a very important amount of traffic targeting accounts that are completely free. Even a very small textual AD adsense-style could mean a lot of money. But they don't do it.

timr4• 14 years ago

"Github is the ultimate no-bullshit company. Any new announce is about some good feature or small improvement that matters"

It's funny that you should say this, because I have pretty much the exact opposite impression. Most of their feature announcements are for dubious changes that don't make my life better (web-based CLI? Stars-vs-followers?), but more to the point, they've left really important things to languish (for example: their code search sucks, and their issue tracking system is just barely usable.)

I don't get the sense that GitHub is rowing in the same direction as a company. Their product isn't improving in any consistent way, and for all of the changes that they announce, I'm having a hard time of thinking of the last one that made a positive impact on my life. Certainly, I've never before needed to create a file in github via the web, and I probably never will.

Slix• 14 years ago

I think that the stars vs followers update was far from useless. That improvement was absolutely fantastic.

I (and I assume lots of other people) were following repositories because they liked them, the same way someone might bookmark a page because they liked it. But this meant they got every commit and issue update for lots of projects, which was unnecessary clutter.

Github realized this and made a distinction between liking a repository and actively following its every change.

The stars/followers update says a lot about how good Github is at stepping back and looking at the user experience as a whole.

antirez3• 14 years ago

Well I guess here it is really about tastes because I think the bug tracking system is one of the best features of the site.

The feeling you have of them not moving in the right direction probably is about their development model where internally people think at improvements and submit a pull request or something alike, but I guess they also have some long term projects that try to pursue as a whole.

But well the real point here is that we are talking about different things. I mean, you may not be happy with what they accomplish and I may be happy instead, but the company is in general focused into evolving their product while not annoying users.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

Star-vs-watch is very useful, actually.

eagsalazar22• 14 years ago

Don't they then need to be able to support mergetool? I mean editing, which this essentially is, seems to open a whole can of worms. What if someone else creates a README and pushes to the same branch while you are in the process of creating a README?

38252• 14 years ago

I assume the push would fail?

isbadawi• 14 years ago

I just realized you can edit files. Is that new too? Or is it only the file creation that's new?

Timothee• 14 years ago

Only file creation is new. I had been wondering where file creation was since they added editing though. This is very welcome.

spb2• 14 years ago

Yeah, how long have they had file editing for? I remember seeing it last year, and realizing how quickly I'd hit a wall if I couldn't create new files.

dia123• 14 years ago

Edit is old - you could do that a while back

obilgic• 14 years ago

What about creating a folder?

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

Ha, I just requested that two weeks ago via their feedback page. They didn't really told me that they were so close to implement that.

Now I'm still missing to configure the default settings of the builtin editor.

lux• 14 years ago

This is really cool! One tiny feature request: Remember my last settings for tabs/indentation.

gingerlime• 14 years ago

That's really cool. Would be even nicer if you can upload any file and attach it to a github issue. That's the only thing keeping us from moving our issue tracker to github (private repository). Unless I missed some sneaky way of doing this?

rnadna• 14 years ago

Not only is this a great thing (well, everything about github is pretty great) but now I know that the funny icon can be called "breadcrumb".

roseleafx• 14 years ago

So this means that when github tells you, "We recommend adding a readme to this repo" you can actually do it right there! It's even a link now. Ah this is so great.

You can now create files on GitHub

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