GitHub platform management

  • 4 minutes

Now that you know the basics of the GitHub platform, let’s go over some platform management.

In this unit, we'll cover:

  • Managing notifications and subscriptions.
  • Subscribing to threads and finding threads where you're mentioned.
  • Publicizing your project or organization on GitHub pages.

Managing notifications and subscriptions

You can choose to receive ongoing updates about specific activity on GitHub.com through a subscription. Notifications are the updates that you receive for specific activity to which you're subscribed.

Subscription options

You can choose to subscribe to notifications for:

  • A conversation in a specific issue, pull request, or gist.
  • CI activity, such as the status of workflows in repositories set up with GitHub Actions.
  • Repository issues, pull requests, releases, security alerts, or discussions (if enabled).
  • All activity in a repository.

In some instances, you're automatically subscribed to conversations on GitHub. Examples include opening a pull request or issue, commenting on a thread, or being assigned to an issue or pull request.

If you're no longer interested in a conversation, you can unsubscribe, unwatch, or customize the types of notifications you'll receive in the future.

If you're ever interested in issues that mention a certain user, you can use mentions: as the qualifier to find those specific issues.

What are GitHub Pages?

To round out our journey of GitHub, let’s tackle GitHub pages. You can use GitHub Pages to publicize and host a website about yourself, your organization, or your project directly from a repository on GitHub.com.

GitHub Pages is a static site-hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files straight from a repository on GitHub. Optionally, you can run the files through a build process and publish a website. Edit and push your changes, and your project is live for the public in a visually organized way.

Next up, we'll walk through an exercise to get you started with GitHub. In the next exercise, you'll:

  • Create a new repository.
  • Create a new branch.
  • Commit a file.
  • Open a pull request.
  • And merge a pull request.