Github and Github Desktop

These platforms solve the problem of providing a centralised and user-friendly platform for hosting, collaborating on, and managing Git repositories, streamlining the development and collaboration process.

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The most popular code-hosting platform based on Git is the Microsoft-owned GitHub. Apart from providing the version control features of Git, Github provides features that make collaboration on projects easier, like bug tracking, task management, continuous integration, wikis etc. To further test its possibilities we use it in this course to host all our course documentation.

Usually, software developers use the command line to interact with git repositories. However, if learning Git commands and the command line is too daunting in the beginning, Github has made a GUI platform for this purpose, called GitHub Desktop. With GitHub Desktop you won’t be able to use advanced features of Git, but it can help beginners visualise the steps of pushing and pulling repositories. Watch this video for an introduction to Github Desktop.

You can also perform some basic things like committing new files directly on the Github webpage, which should be enough for the purposes of this course.

Github allows single files of up to 100mb, so most of the time it wouldn’t be enough to share big native BIM files from programs like Revit. Badly exported IFC files can also sometimes have prohibitively large file sizes because of inefficient geometry. Native IFC files are typically much smaller than that, but if they became too large, a good modeller would look into strategies for lowering model size by f.ex. breaking it down into different disciplines. Read more about dealing with large models here. Because IFC files come in human-readable text file formats (the most popular, .ifc, being a STEP format), they are a perfect fit for version control with Git. Therefore BlenderBIM now includes IFC Git, a tool to track, merge and review changes, create forks and branches of your model and visually shows the geometry changed all inside Blender.

Get a Github account, (at least one per team). This will make it possible to host your code on Github and make it easier for us to provide you support and also get feedback and help from your peers. Ultimately we are trying to build a strong community of OpenBIM learning at DTU and this is a great way to do it. 😊