Introduction
You can use GitHub repositories, issues, projects, and other tools to plan and track your work, whether working on an individual project or cross-functional team.
In this guide, you will learn how to create and set up a repository for collaborating with a group of people, create issue templates and forms, open issues and break down work, and establish a project for organizing and tracking issues.
Creating a repository
When starting a new project, initiative, or feature, the first step is to create a repository. Repositories contain all of your project's files and give you a place to collaborate with others and manage your work. For more information, see Creating a new repository.
You can set up repositories for different purposes based on your needs. The following are some common use cases:
- Product repositories: Larger organizations that track their work and goals around specific products may have one or more repositories containing the code and other files. These repositories can also be used for documentation, reporting on product health or future plans for the product.
- Project repositories: You can create a repository for an individual project you are working on, or for a project you are collaborating on with others. For an organization that tracks work for short-lived initiatives or projects, such as a consulting firm, there is a need to report on the health of a project and move people between different projects based on skills and needs. Code for the project is often contained in a single repository.
- Team repositories: For an organization that groups people into teams, and brings projects to them, such as a dev tools team, code may be scattered across many repositories for the different work they need to track. In this case it may be helpful to have a team-specific repository as one place to track all the work the team is involved in.
- Personal repositories: You can create a personal repository to track all your work in one place, plan future tasks, or even add notes or information you want to save. You can also add collaborators if you want to share this information with others.
You can create multiple, separate repositories if you want different access permissions for the source code and for tracking issues and discussions. For more information, see Creating an issues-only repository.
For the following examples in this guide, we will be using an example repository called Project Octocat.
Communicating repository information
You can create a README.md file for your repository to introduce your team or project and communicate important information about it. A README is often the first item a visitor to your repository will see, so you can also provide information on how users or contributors can get started with the project and how to contact the team. For more information, see About the repository README file.