GitHub for Beginners: Getting started with Git and GitHub in VS Code

Welcome back to GitHub for Beginners. We’ve covered a lot this season, so make sure to check out our other episodes. Our most recent one was all about open source, what it is and how to contribute to the community. This time, we’re going to take a look at VS Code, a free popular source code editor provided by Microsoft. It has a fair amount of functionality built in that integrates with GitHub, which is what we’ll be taking a look at today. Using GitHub in VS Code reduces context switching, streamlines your workflow, and boosts your productivity. By the end of this post, you’ll understand how to use VS Code to initialize a repository, switch branches, as well as stage, commit, and push your changes. And the best part is, you’ll be able to do all this without leaving the editor. Note that if you want to follow along with this blog post (or the video), you will need to install both Git and VS Code . If you need a refresher on how to install Git, you can check out one of our earlier GitHub for Beginners episodes . As always, if you prefer to watch the video or want to reference it, we have all of our GitHub for Beginners episodes available on YouTube . First some basics You probably already know that GitHub is a resource that hosts only copies of your code in repositories. So what is Git? Git is the program for managing that source code, and it can be used in multiple different ways (e.g., from the command line, through VS Code, etc.). Visual Studio Code, often abbreviated as VS Code, leverages Git to enable you to manage your code in GitHub. Initializing a folder The first step to using Git with VS Code is initializing a folder to reflect your repository on GitHub. Open VS Code. Select the top icon (the Explorer icon) in the left-hand column. It looks like two files on top of each other. Click the Open Folder button. In the file explorer, select a folder that has some code you want to upload to GitHub, and click Open . After opening your code, select the Source Contro