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Glossary

General Terms

Administrators: users with full, unrestricted access to a repository to make changes and approve edits

Branch: personal, outlying repository area used to test features without making changes to the main branch

Checks: automated tests that make sure everything in a repository is working correctly

Cloud: online storage format primarily used to back up data; requires internet access

Code Reviews: a software development practice where team members examine each other’s code to ensure quality and accuracy

Command Line: used to type commands for a computer's operating system to perform

Command-line Interface: a text-based interface that allows users to interact with a computer's operating system by typing commands

Command Prompt: the Windows command interface

Commit: confirms and publishes changes in a repository

Conflict: a difference in code that prevents a file from merging two different versions automatically, requiring manual edits from the repository owner or administrators

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Pipeline: an automated process that helps teams build, test, and release software—or documentation—more efficiently and reliably

Diffs: abbreviation for the word differences; used to show differences between file versions

Docs as Code: documentation is treated with the same care, discipline, and tooling as software development

Docs as Code Pipeline: writers create and edit content in branches, submit pull requests for peer review, and rely on tools like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket for collaboration and versioning

Fork: a copy of a repository created for someone other than the owner to make edits

Local: a machine's file storage system; files are primarily stored on a machine's harddrive

Main: default development branch; AKA master

Merge: used to save and publish changes to a repository from a pull request

Plain-text Format: a file format that contains only text data

Pull: downloads updated repository data to a local machine

Pull Requests: used when someone wants to get changes approved and implemented in a repository; the repository owner must approve them to be implemented

Push: sends changes made to a repository on a local machine to the forked repository

README: a file most commonly used as a description for a repository; most often saved as a Markdown file

Remote: online storage format either through internet or external servers

Repository: stores any files, folders, and previous versions of a project on GitHub

Resolve Conflicts: necessitates that code needs to be edited in order to make a file mergeable with another

Terminal: the Mac command interface

Version Control Systems: tools designed to control files, have access to a file's history, and can revert to a specific version

Wiki: a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by users, often used for shared documentation or knowledge bases; contains any documentation related to a GitHub repository

Coding Languages/Tools

AsciiDoc: a plain text markup language used to write technical documentation

CSS: a markup coding language used to design website interfaces; AKA Cascading Style Sheets

Git: a distributed version control system that allows multiple people to work on the same project while keeping a complete, trackable history of every change

GitHub: a cloud-based platform built on top of Git that simplifies collaboration and version control, providing a web interface where users can browse files, review code or documentation, report issues, and manage projects

GitHub Pages: used to host GitHub repositories as websites

GitLab: a platform for hosting Git repositories and managing DevOps workflows, similar to GitHub

HTML: plain text markup coding language that is mainly used to create a website's structure; AKA HyperText Markup Language

Jekyll: a tool that generates a static website from a plain text file

Markdown: a plain text coding language that uses an easy-to-read format syntax

MkDocs: a tool that generates a website from a Markdown file

Netlify: a platform that automates building and hosting static websites

reStructuredText: a markup language, similar to Markdown, specifically made for technical documentation

Sphinx: a documentation generator that can output documentation into various different file types

Visual Studio Code: a source-code editing application developed by Microsoft

Git Commands

cat: reads and displays changes in a specific repository file

cd: basic command-line tool, which stands for "change directory"

echo: used to output text as a header or body text

git add: tells Git to prepare for a change you want to save, but does not save changes

git checkout: used to switch branches

git commit: saves a snapshot of the file

git diff: compares the differences in branches

git init: create an invisible .git file where versions and metadata will be stored

git log: shows a complete list of commits, with full details

git log --oneline: shows a compact list of commits, with minimal details

git reset: used to revert a file to a previous commit

git status: checks and displays the current condition of the Git directory and staging area

-m: adds a description of a code change

mkdir: basic command-line tool, which stands for "make directory"; creates a new folder (repository)

>: overwrites a file

>>>: amends a file

Definitions adapted from Docs as Code, GitHub Glossary, Git Cheat Sheet, Write the Docs, and A Comprehensive Guide to Technical Writing Tools and Software