• 4 minutes

You've learned how Git enables you to track the changes to your Bicep code. In this unit, you'll learn how Git also enables collaboration with your team members.

What are GitHub and Azure Repos?

Git is software that you install and run on your own computer. As you've learned, Git keeps track of the changes you make to your files. It enables features like branching.

GitHub and Azure Repos are online services that keep copies of your Git repository and enable collaborative development. After you sign up for GitHub or Azure Repos, you continue to work with Git by using the same commands you've already been using. You continue working against your local Git repository. The difference is that you can synchronize your local Git repository with an online repository. You can also grant access to the online repository to other people, and you can control whether they can read or modify your code.

In a team environment, everyone on the team maintains their own local Git repository and synchronizes it with the online copy. In most situations, the online copy becomes the source of truth for your team.

In a future module, you'll learn about deploying your Bicep code through an automated deployment pipeline. Pipelines require that your code is stored in an online repository. The pipeline accesses the code from there too.

Local and remote repositories

When you work with repositories hosted in GitHub or Azure DevOps, you configure your local Git repository to know about the remote repository. An online repository has a URL that Git can use to access it from your computer. Conventionally, the term origin refers to the remote repository that your local repository synchronizes with.

You also need to set up tracking branches that tell Git a branch from your local repository represents the same branch as in your online repository. This tracking is especially important for your main branch, because you want to keep that synchronized across all of your repositories. You can enable tracking on other branches too.

After you've configured your local repository and tracking branch, you can push the contents of your local repository to the remote repository. And you can pull the remote repository's changes into your local repository.

Authentication

When you start working with online repositories, security becomes important. Source code for your infrastructure and applications is valuable, and it needs to be protected.

GitHub and Azure DevOps have comprehensive security processes. They both require that you authenticate before you start working with remote repositories hosted on their platforms.

The first time you try to work with a remote repository, you're prompted to sign in to GitHub or Azure DevOps. Some organizations protect their Git repositories with extra security checks like multifactor authentication. After you sign in, Git uses a component called Git Credential Manager to maintain your access so you don't need to sign in every time.

Collaboration with others

After you set up your Git repository on GitHub or Azure Repos, you're ready to collaborate with others. There are many features that you can use to work with your team. One particular feature that you should know about is called pull requests, often shortened to PRs.

A pull request is effectively a controlled merge of two branches. GitHub or Azure Repos can enforce policies about who can merge and what kinds of changes can be merged.

A typical team workflow would involve a team member making changes to their code on a branch, and then creating a pull request to ask someone else to merge their changes into the main branch. Other team members can see the list of changes in the PR. Those team members can even provide feedback on the changes or ask for revisions before they accept them. PRs provide a way to provide quality control around your team's code.

PRs and other collaboration features are outside the scope of this module, but we provide links to information about these features in the summary.