GH-900: GitHub Foundations

Note: This lab pre-provisions a Windows VM and GitHub Enterprise sign-in credentials at start — allow up to 10 minutes for the environment to become ready before beginning the exercises.

Follow Alex Kim through the local-Git mechanics every GitHub Foundations student needs: in Exercise 1, sign in to NorthPeak's GitHub Enterprise, configure a Git identity, create a brand-new local repository, grow its commit history to eight commits, and walk the past with git log, git show, git checkout, and git restore. In Exercise 2, create and switch feature branches, perform fast-forward and three-way merges, deliberately trigger a merge conflict, resolve it in VS Code, and practice git merge --abort as the escape hatch. Everything runs locally on the lab's Windows 11 VM — the next lab is where you push to GitHub Enterprise for the first time.

Note: This lab pre-provisions a Windows VM and GitHub Enterprise sign-in credentials at start — allow up to 10 minutes for the environment to become ready before beginning the exercises.

Follow Alex Kim through the first push to GitHub Enterprise and the end-to-end anatomy of a review-ready repo. In Exercise 1, sign in to skillmeupai.ghe.com, create a repo in labusers/ with the gh repo create --source=. --push one-command shortcut, run through the GitHub Flow loop (feature branch → PR → squash merge → sync), review a PR from the terminal and the web, and write an issue in Markdown with headings, task lists, @mentions, and a fenced code block. In Exercise 2, create a SECOND repo through the GHE web UI manually (New Repository → clone empty → add files → git remote add origin → git push -u origin main) so the student sees what the CLI shortcut was doing under the hood, then round out the new repo with the five first-class root files (README, LICENSE, CONTRIBUTING, .github/CODEOWNERS, SECURITY.md) landed through five separate feature-branch pull requests, and confirm the Community Standards checklist is fully green. Everything runs on the lab's Windows 11 VM — all repos the student creates get wiped at lab end.

Note: This lab pre-provisions a Windows VM and GitHub Enterprise sign-in credentials at start — allow up to 10 minutes for the environment to become ready before beginning the exercises.

Follow Alex Kim through the collaboration surfaces of GitHub end-to-end. Exercise 1 covers Issues — sign in, open a repo, create labels and milestones, use issue templates, filter the issues board. Exercise 2 covers Discussions and Notifications — enable Discussions, create categories, convert between discussion and issue, tune watch levels and routing in Settings → Notifications. Exercise 3 is the pull request pass end-to-end: open a disciplined PR with a template, run the review surface in the GHE web UI (line-level comments, suggestion blocks, Viewed checkboxes, verdicts), lock main with branch protection, and merge three separate PRs with each of the three merge strategies so the git log difference sits side-by-side.

Note: This lab pre-provisions a Windows VM and GitHub Enterprise sign-in credentials at start — allow up to 10 minutes for the environment to become ready before beginning the exercises.

Drive GitHub Actions and GitHub Copilot end-to-end on NorthPeak's skillmeupai.ghe.com instance. In Exercise 1, sign in to GHE, create a private repo, scaffold a tiny Node project, write .github/workflows/ci.yml, watch CI block a bad PR, fix it, merge, and promote the check to required on protected main. In Exercise 2, add a repository Actions secret the workflow reads via env:, ship a release.yml that produces a tarball artifact, tour the Actions tab (run list, step logs, Re-run, Artifacts), and optionally wire a GitHub Pages deployment. In Exercise 3, bring GitHub Copilot into the same codebase — inline suggestions, Chat with slash commands, the gh copilot CLI, Edit mode on a surgical rename, Agent Mode on a multi-file feature with npm test iteration, the multi-model picker, the github.com PR summary surface, and optionally the @copilot coding agent on an issue.

Note: This lab pre-provisions a Windows VM and GitHub Enterprise sign-in credentials at start — allow up to 10 minutes for the environment to become ready before beginning the exercises.

Spin up the cloud dev environments Alex Kim uses at NorthPeak and walk the community + open-source + InnerSource surfaces: launch a Codespace, inspect and customize its dev container definition, suspend and resume to see how billing behaves, jump to github.dev for a quick edit that doesn't need a full container, then stand up a GitHub Project with Board/Table/Roadmap views on the same repo, walk Sponsors eligibility and Marketplace, mark the repo as a template, and apply the InnerSource conventions. By the end of this lab you will be able to launch and configure a Codespace, read a dev container definition, choose between Codespaces and github.dev, build a Project with custom fields and workflows, and defend the right sharing model for a given audience.