This is a timeline of GitHub , a web-based Git or version control repository and Internet hosting service.
Time Period | Development summary | More details |
---|---|---|
2007 | Conception, initial launch, and core features | GitHub is founded initially as Logical Awesome in February and the website launches in April. Core parts of GitHub launch during this year, including the company blog, per-project wikis, GitHub Gist, and GitHub Pages. [1] |
2009 –June 2013 | Continued growth and product releases | GitHub continues to release products including GitHub Enterprise, Redcarpet, and Hubot. Many companies that now regularly use GitHub—including Facebook and Google—join GitHub during this period. [2] |
July 2013 –September 2015 | Continued growth and product releases; outreach; attacks and censorship against the site; CEO resigns | GitHub continues to launch a series of products and enhancements to existing products. For the desktop, it releases Electron, Atom, and a desktop client. In terms of outreach, it launches the Bug Bounty Program, ChooseALicense.com, GitHub Classroom, GitHub Student Developer Pack, and the GitHub Engineering blog. The GitHub website also experiences multiple attacks as well as censorship from governments. In April 2014, co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigns from the company following allegations of harassment. [3] |
October 2015 –present | Change in pricing model | GitHub changes its pricing model from a repository-based one to a user-based one; in the process, it introduces unlimited private repositories for all customers. [4] [5] |
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2022) |
Year | Month and date | Event type | Details |
---|---|---|---|
2005 | 7 April | Background | The initial version of Git, a version control system with support for data integrity, [6] is released. Git would come to power GitHub. [7] |
2006 | 11 October | Competition | First public Git free hosting platform repo.or.cz is fully launched. [8] This came several weeks after an initial launch focusing only on public mirroring and gitweb services. [9] |
2007 | 19 October | Company | Development of the GitHub platform begins. [10] |
2008 | 29 February | Company | GitHub is founded. [1] |
22 February | Product | GitHub launches its company blog. In the announcement blog post, GitHub notes that per-project wikis have also launched. [11] | |
10 April | Product | Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett launch the GitHub website after having made it available a few months prior as a beta release. [12] | |
18 June | Userbase | Reddit joins GitHub. [13] | |
9 July | Userbase | Yahoo! joins GitHub. [14] | |
21 July | Product | GitHub launches Gist, a pastebin-style service with versioning. [15] [16] | |
5 November | Product | The initial version of Jekyll, a static site generator, is released by GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner. [17] [18] Jekyll would come to power GitHub Pages. | |
14 December | Userbase | The Sunlight Foundation, an American 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for open government, [19] joins GitHub. [20] By September 2010, the foundation would have 97 software projects hosted on GitHub. [21] | |
18 December | Product | GitHub announces GitHub Pages, a way for users to create custom websites. [22] | |
[ data missing ] | Competition | Bitbucket launches [23] | |
2009 | 10 January | GitHub wins "best bootstrapped startup" from the Crunchies. [24] | |
29 January | Userbase | Twitter joins GitHub. [25] | |
24 February | Growth (repository) | GitHub team members announce, in a talk at Yahoo! headquarters, that within the first year of being online, GitHub has accumulated over 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of which were formed in the previous month alone. At this time, about 6,200 repositories have been forked at least once and 4,600 have been merged. | |
1 April | Userbase | Facebook joins GitHub. [26] | |
20 April | Product | GitHub completes its transition to use GitHub Flavored Markdown on the site. GitHub Flavored Markdown is a variant of the Markdown markup language. [27] | |
5 July | Growth (user) | GitHub reaches 100,000 users. [28] [29] | |
27 July | Growth (repository) | Tom Preston-Werner announces that GitHub has grown to host 90,000 unique public repositories, 12,000 having been forked at least once, for a total of 135,000 repositories. [30] | |
14 December | Product | The initial commit to the Semantic Versioning repository is made by Tom Preston-Werner. [31] [32] | |
2010 | January | Company | GitHub Inc started to operate GitHub. [33] |
10 March | Product | GitHub introduces Compare View, a feature that allows users to compare commits in a Git repository. [34] In July, GitHub would add support for comparing across repositories. [35] | |
1 July | Ruby and JavaScript become the most popular languages on GitHub, with 19% and 17% of the hosted code, respectively. [1] | ||
24 July | Growth (repository) | GitHub hits 1 million hosted repositories. Of these repositories, 60% are regular repositories while the remaining 40% are Gists. [36] [37] | |
12 August | Product | GitHub announces that its per-project wikis are now backed by Git. The company also releases Gollum, the software powering these wikis. [38] On the same day, Gollum is declared to be version 1.0.0. [39] | |
29 December | Userbase | Pinterest joins GitHub. [40] | |
2011 | 19 April | Product | GitHub releases Redcarpet, a Markdown parsing library based on Upskirt. [41] |
20 April | Growth (repository) | GitHub announces that it is hosting 2 million repositories. [42] [43] | |
2 June | Growth | ReadWriteWeb reports that GitHub has surpassed SourceForge, Google Code, and CodePlex in total number of commits for the period January to May 2011. [44] [45] | |
23 June | Growth (employee) | At this time, GitHub has 33 employees. [46] | |
15 August | Product | GitHub begins using the Ace code editor when editing files on the web interface. [47] | |
October (approximate) | Competition | GitLab launches. [48] | |
11 October | Product | The initial version (version 1.0.0) of Hubot, a chatbot developed by GitHub and written in CoffeeScript, is released. [49] [50] [51] [52] | |
1 November | Product | GitHub launches GitHub Enterprise. GitHub Enterprise is similar to GitHub's public service but is designed for use by large-scale enterprise software development teams where the enterprise wishes to host their repositories behind a corporate firewall. [2] | |
2012 | 17 January | Userbase | Google joins GitHub. [53] |
6 April | Userbase | The United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announces that it will open source the software it writes or contracts with a third party to write. The agency decides to host its source code on GitHub. [54] [55] | |
1 July | Financial | GitHub receives $100 million in a series of investment, primarily from Andreessen Horowitz and Tom Preston-Warner becomes CEO. [1] | |
9 July | Financial | Peter Levine, general partner at GitHub's investor Andreessen Horowitz, states that GitHub has been growing revenue at 300% annually. [56] | |
1 August | Userbase | The source code for the petitioning system We the People as well as the mobile apps White House for iOS and White House for Android are released on GitHub. [1] | |
10 September | GitHub experiences service outage due to a poor database migration. [57] | ||
18 October | Censorship | GitHub goes down due to a distributed denial-of-service attack. [58] | |
13 December | Growth (employee) | At this time, GitHub has 139 employees. [59] | |
2013 | 3 January | Product | GitHub introduces ZeroClipboard to the site, which allows for copying long lines of text and hashes with a single click. [60] |
7 January | Product | GitHub launches Contributions, an addition to user profile pages that shows which repositories the user has been active in, as well as a calendar of activities. [61] [62] | |
14 January | User growth, repository growth | GitHub reaches 3 million total users. At this time, GitHub also has almost 5 million repositories. [63] [64] | |
21 January | Censorship | GitHub is blocked in China using DNS hijacking. Confirming the block, a spokesperson for GitHub says: "It does appear that we're at least being partly blocked by the Great Firewall of China". [65] The block would be lifted on January 23, 2013 after an online protest on Sina Weibo. [66] | |
26 January | Censorship | GitHub users in China experience a man-in-the-middle attack in which attackers could have possibly intercepted traffic between the site and its users in China. The mechanism of the attack is through a fake SSL certificate. [67] Users attempting to access GitHub received a warning of an invalid SSL certificate, which due to being signed by an unknown authority was quickly detected. [68] | |
15 February | Product | GitHub open-sources Boxen, a tool that automates setting up macOS machines. [69] | |
April | Product | GitHub adds support for the STL file format for 3D modeling. [70] | |
5 April | Product | GitHub moves GitHub Pages to a dedicated domain, github.io. GitHub cites security reasons for the migration: to remove "potential vectors for cross domain attacks targeting the main github.com session" and mitigate phishing attempts. This migration reserves github.com for GitHub itself. [71] [72] | |
9 May | Userbase | United States president Barack Obama signs Executive Order 13642, "Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information". As part of this new Open Data Policy, data is released on GitHub. [73] [74] | |
23 May | Growth (repository) | GitHub reaches 3.5 million users and 6 million repositories. [1] | |
31 May | Product | GitHub announces the release of Octokit, a set of client libraries for working with the GitHub API. [75] | |
15 July | Product | GitHub launches the ChooseALicense.com website to help users choose a free and open-source software license. [76] [77] | |
15 July | Product | The initial version of Electron (at the time called Atom Shell) is released by GitHub. [78] [79] [80] | |
7 August | Growth (repository) | GitHub reaches 7 million projects by their users. [1] | |
September | Growth (user) | GitHub reaches 4 million active users. [81] | |
20 December | Userbase | Facebook publishes a blog post about its progress in open-source software. At the time, Facebook has over 90 Git repositories hosted on GitHub. [82] | |
22 December | Growth (employee) | At this time, GitHub has 234 employees. [83] | |
23 December | Growth (repository) | GitHub announces it has reached 10 million repositories. [84] [85] | |
late in the year | Userbase | Microsoft joins GitHub. [86] | |
2014 | 6 January | Acquisition | Easel, a browser-based web design tool, announces that it has been acquired by GitHub. GitHub would announce the acquisition several days later. [87] [88] [89] |
9 January | Product | GitHub launches their Bug Bounty Program and Chris Wanstrath becomes CEO for the second time. [90] [91] | |
12 February | Legal | WhatsApp sends a DMCA takedown request to GitHub for alleged copyright and trademark violations. [92] [93] | |
26 February | Product | GitHub releases the initial version of Atom, a free and open-source [94] [95] text and source code editor. [96] | |
17 March | Company | GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleges that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led to her leaving the company. [1] [97] | |
April | Company | GitHub releases a statement denying Horvath's allegations of harassment. [3] [98] However, following an internal investigation, GitHub would confirm the claims. GitHub's CEO Chris Wanstrath would write on the company blog, "The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub's CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office." [99] CEO Preston-Werner would subsequently resign from the company. | |
6 May | Product | GitHub fully releases the source code of its text editor Atom. Previously, many of its libraries and packages were open source, but the editor itself was not. [100] | |
16 May | The Crunchies announces that GitHub is a winner in Best Bootstrapped Startup. [1] | ||
17 July | Company | GitHub introduces a middle management system. Prior to this, GitHub was a flat organization. [1] | |
7 October | Product | GitHub announces the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which gives students access to various premium services from GitHub and other tech companies. [101] [102] [103] | |
2 December | Censorship | Roscomnadzor, Russia's regulatory agency, blocks GitHub for hosting various copies of a suicide manual. Because GitHub uses HTTPS, which encrypts data between a user's computer and GitHub, internet service providers (ISP) are forced to block the whole website instead of the pages in question. Complying ISPs included Beeline, MTS, MGTS, and Megafon. Maxim Ksenzov, the Deputy Head of the Roscomnadzor, said in a statement that the block was due to GitHub not complying with earlier takedown requests for the manual on October 10, 2014. [104] GitHub was also momentarily blocked on October 2, 2014 until the original copy of the manual was deleted. [105] | |
31 December | Censorship | GitHub is blocked in India (along with 31 other Websites) over pro-ISIS content posted by users. [106] On 10 January 2015, GitHub would be unblocked. Again, on 12 September 2015, GitHub would be blocked all over India. [107] | |
2015 | 28 January | Product | GitHub announces that it has doubled its maximum payout for its bounty program to $10,000. [108] |
2 February | Userbase | The Office of Management and Budget releases budget data for fiscal years 2016 and 2017. [109] [110] | |
7 February | Growth (employee) | At this time, GitHub has 257 employees. [111] | |
March | Competition | Google announces that it would be closing down Google Code on January 15, 2016. [112] Most projects on the site would enter read-only mode on August 24, 2015. [113] | |
26 March | Censorship | GitHub falls victim to a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that lasts for more than 118 hours. [114] The attack, which appeared to originate from China, primarily targeted GitHub-hosted user content describing methods of circumventing Internet censorship. [115] [116] [117] | |
30 March | Growth (user) | GitHub reports having over 9 million users and over 21.1 million repositories, making it the largest host of source code in the world. [118] | |
8 April | Product | GitHub announces Git Large File Storage (Git LFS). Git LFS allows users to store and work with large binary files in Git. [119] [120] | |
30 April | At the conference Build 2015, Microsoft announces that Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 will have GitHub integrations, and that GitHub Enterprise would become available on Microsoft Azure. [121] | ||
19 May | Product | GitHub launches the GitHub Engineering blog, which hosts information about GitHub's engineering practices. [122] | |
3 June | Company | GitHub announces the formation of GitHub Japan G.K., a subsidiary of GitHub, Inc., as well as its new office in Tokyo, Japan. This new office is the first GitHub office outside of the United States. [123] [124] | |
25 June | Product | GitHub releases version 1.0 of its Atom text editor. [125] [126] | |
25 July | Financial | GitHub announces it has raised $250 million in funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital. The round valued the company at approximately $2 billion. [1] [127] | |
12 August | Product | GitHub launches a desktop client for working with the site, for macOS and Microsoft Windows. [128] [129] | |
15 August | Growth (employee) | At this time, GitHub has 330 employees. [130] | |
1 September | Growth (user) | At this time, GitHub has around 10 million users. [1] | |
1 September | Growth (user) | Around this time, 10,000 users are reportedly joining GitHub per weekday. [131] | |
22 September | Product | GitHub launches GitHub Classroom, a way for teachers to create and share programming assignments. [132] | |
24 September | Chris Wanstrath, co-founder and CEO of GitHub, is named as one of the Fortune 40 Under 40. [133] | ||
1 October –2 October | Conference | GitHub Universe 2015 takes place in San Francisco, California. [134] GitHub Universe is GitHub's user conference; the company would continue to host the conference in subsequent years. [135] [136] | |
1 October | Product | GitHub announces a partnership with Yubico to allow YubiKey authentication on the GitHub website. [137] | |
3 December | Userbase | Apple open-sources its programming language Swift and hosts it on GitHub. [138] This also marks the beginning of Apple using GitHub, as the company did not host anything on GitHub prior to this. [139] [140] | |
2016 | 28 January | Growth (repository) | At this time, there are over 29 million repositories on GitHub. [43] |
28 March | Growth (user) | GitHub announces that Atom, a text editor it created, has hit 1 million monthly active users. [141] GitHub knows this number because Atom comes with a package called metrics that tracks usage information using Google Analytics and sends it to GitHub. [142] | |
5 April | Company | GitHub announces Spokes (called Distributed Git or DGit at the time), GitHub's application-level replication system for Git, which makes GitHub more resilient to server outages. [143] [144] [145] | |
9 May | Product | Version 1 of Electron is released. [146] [147] | |
10 May | Product | GitHub introduces unlimited private repositories as it changes its pricing model from a repository-based one to a user-based one. [4] [5] | |
17 May | Growth (employee) | At this time, GitHub has 568 employees. [148] | |
6 July | Userbase | Nike, Inc. releases the source code of several of its projects on GitHub. [149] [150] | |
14 September –15 September | Conference | GitHub Universe 2016 takes place in San Francisco, California. [151] GitHub Universe is "the flagship user conference for the GitHub community". [152] | |
8 October | Censorship | GitHub access is blocked by the Turkish government to prevent email leakage of a hacked account belonging to the country's Energy Minister. [153] | |
24 December | Growth (employee) | At this time, GitHub has 592 employees. [154] | |
2017 | 14 February | Product | GitHub launches the Open Source Guides at the dedicated domain name opensource.guide. [155] [156] |
2018 | 4 June | Company | Microsoft announced it is acquiring GitHub. |
16 August | Product | GitHub Actions is launched [157] | |
2019 | 23 May | Acquisition | GitHub acquired dependabot. [158] |
18 September | Acquisition | GitHub acquired semmle. [159] | |
2020 | 16 March | Acquisition | GitHub announced that they are acquiring npm. [160] |
2023 | 28 Jan | Usage | GitHub reports having ~100 million users, making it the largest host of source code in the world |
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively.
A source-code-hosting facility is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to maintain revision and version history, or version control. Many repositories provide a bug tracking system, and offer release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based project documentation. Software authors generally retain their copyright when software is posted to a code hosting facilities.
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GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, which provides distributed version control of access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
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Thomas Preston-Werner is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.
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Unvanquished is a free and open-source video game. It is a multiplayer first-person shooter and real-time strategy game where Humans and Aliens fight for domination.
Atom is a free and open-source text and source-code editor for macOS, Linux, and Windows with support for plug-ins written in JavaScript, and embedded Git control. Developed by GitHub, Atom was released on June 25, 2015.
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.
GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package that can develop, secure, and operate software. GitLab includes a distributed version control based on Git, including features such as access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project, as well as snippets.
React is a free and open-source front-end JavaScript library that aims to make building user interfaces based on components more "seamless". It is maintained by Meta and a community of individual developers and companies.
Gitter is an open-source instant messaging and chat room system for developers and users of GitLab and GitHub repositories. Gitter is provided as software-as-a-service, with a free option providing all basic features and the ability to create a single private chat room, and paid subscription options for individuals and organisations, which allows them to create arbitrary numbers of private chat rooms.
GitHub has been the target of censorship from governments using methods ranging from local Internet service provider blocks, intermediary blocking using methods such as DNS hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks, and denial-of-service attacks on GitHub's servers from countries including China, India, Iraq, Russia, and Turkey. In all of these cases, GitHub has been eventually unblocked after backlash from users and technology businesses or compliance from GitHub.
Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded version control with Git. Users can change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add functionality.
Wercker is a Docker-based continuous delivery platform that helps software developers build and deploy their applications and microservices. Using its command-line interface, developers can create Docker containers on their desktop, automate their build and deploy processes, testing them on their desktop, and then deploy them to various cloud platforms, ranging from Heroku to AWS and Rackspace. The command-line interface to Wercker has been open-sourced.
Coraline Ada Ehmke is an American software developer, open source advocate, and Founder and Executive Director of the Organization for Ethical Source, based in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career as a web developer in 1994 and has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, consulting, education, advertising, healthcare, and software development infrastructure. She is known for her work in Ruby, and in 2016 earned the Ruby Hero award at RailsConf, a conference for Ruby on Rails developers. She is also known for her social justice work and activism, writing the Contributor Covenant and Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, and promoting the widespread adoption of codes of conduct for open source projects and communities.
Chris Wanstrath is an American technology entrepreneur and programmer. He is the founder of Null Games, and the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. Wanstrath co-founded GitHub in 2008 and sold it to Microsoft in 2018. Before starting GitHub, he worked with CNET on GameSpot and Chowhound. In addition to GitHub, he created the Atom text editor, Ruby's Resque job queue, the Mustache templating language, and the pjax JavaScript library. According to Forbes his net worth is estimated at US$1.8-2.2 billion and is listed in America's richest entrepreneurs under 40, as well as Fortune's 40 under 40 and he was named in CNBC's Disruptor 50 list.
GitHub hosts about 10,000 projects and officially launched in April of this year after a beta period of a few months.
Joined on Jun 18, 2008
Joined on Jul 09, 2008
Joined on Dec 14, 2008
Joined on Jan 29, 2009
Joined on Apr 01, 2009
Joined on Dec 29, 2010
In 2011, there were 2 million repositories on GitHub. Today, there are over 29 million. GitHub's Brian Doll noted that the first million repositories took nearly 4 years to create; getting from nine to ten million took just 48 days.
During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.
Hubbernauts Employed 33
Joined on Jan 17, 2012
Hubbernauts 139
Monday night, on the very first day of our all-hands winter summit this week, the three millionth person signed up for a GitHub account.
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On our GitHub account alone, we now have more than 90 repos comprising over 40,000 commits and that have collectively been forked 15,000 times.
Hubbernauts 234
Late last year Microsoft finally made itself an account on Github
The GitHub Bug Bounty Program is turning three years old.
Shawn Davenport, VP of security at GitHub, launched the company's bug bounty program a year and a half ago, but the time it took to get there was much longer, he says.
Today, after 10 weeks in public beta, it is making all of the editor available under the MIT open source license, including all of the packages and libraries that make allow it to support different programming languages.
Michael Mimoso
Daniel Terdiman
There are 257 of us working at GitHub, from all over the globe.
There are 330 of us working at GitHub, from all over the globe.
This organization has no public repositories. This organization has no public members. You must be a member to see who's a part of this organization.
In the same way that aggregate usage information is important when developing a web application, we've found that it's just as important for desktop applications. By knowing which Atom features are being used the most, and how the editor is performing, we can focus our development efforts in the right place.
There are 568 of us working at GitHub, from all over the globe.
592 Employees worldwide