GitHub

What GitHub is

GitHub is a cloud platform for hosting code and collaborating on it, built around the Git version control system. Where Git records a project’s history on a machine, GitHub puts that repository online and adds the layer that turns version control into teamwork: a place to review changes, track work and automate testing and deployment.

Its central feature is the pull request, a proposed change, packaged up so it can be seen, discussed and checked before it’s accepted into the main project. On top of that sit GitHub Actions (automated pipelines that run checks or deploy on each push), Issues and project boards for tracking work, and fine-grained access control. The effect is that “review before you ship” and “deploy automatically” become the normal way of working rather than something you have to remember to do.

How HDC uses GitHub

GitHub is the home of our code and the engine of how we ship. In practice:

• We host every client project repository privately on GitHub, with access limited to the people who need it and a full audit trail of changes.
• We propose changes as pull requests, so each one is reviewed and checked by automated tests before it merges, mistakes get caught off to the side, not on the live site.
• We use GitHub Actions to run automated checks on every push, sometimes inside Docker containers, so the environment we test in is consistent.
• We connect repositories to Cloudflare Pages, so a push to the main branch builds and deploys the site automatically, with preview deploys for branches. This very website is hosted and deployed exactly this way.

Why we apply it

For clients, GitHub is why changes to their site are deliberate rather than risky. Nothing reaches the live site without being reviewed and tested, and because deploys are automated, there’s no error-prone manual upload step where things go wrong. A change is seen, approved on a preview URL, then shipped, predictably, every time.

It also protects the project as an asset. The complete record of who changed what and why keeps the site maintainable, access can be granted and revoked cleanly as teams change, and the work is never trapped on one person’s laptop. That’s continuity a client can rely on.

How GitHub fits our stack

GitHub is the hub our delivery workflow rotates around. It hosts the Git repositories that version our Astro codebases, runs Docker-based automated checks through GitHub Actions, and connects to Cloudflare so each push builds and deploys the site with preview URLs along the way. For certain stacks, Azure DevOps offers an alternative CI/CD home, but GitHub is our default. Everything from the first commit to the live deploy passes through it, which keeps the whole pipeline in one auditable, automated place.

When GitHub isn’t the right tool

GitHub is the right home for code on essentially all our projects, so the caveats are narrow. It’s not a content management system, when a client needs to edit page copy or publish posts themselves, we give them a CMS, not GitHub access. For organisations already standardised on a different platform such as Azure DevOps or GitLab, we’ll work within their ecosystem rather than force a move. And the heavier collaboration features are more than a tiny one-off project needs, though even then, the hosting, review and auto-deploy alone earn their place.