Blog · No. 08 · Beginner
GitHub for Claude users (a plain-English tour).
At some point, if you stick with Claude long enough, someone will say "put it on GitHub" and you will nod politely while having absolutely no idea what that means. I know this because it happened to me, and because it has happened to at least three people at my workshops.
Here is the short version: GitHub is where code lives on the internet. If Claude builds you a website, a script, a little tool that does something useful, GitHub is where that thing gets stored. Think of it as Dropbox for code, except it also remembers every change anyone ever made, which turns out to be spectacularly useful.
You do not need GitHub to use Claude. But if Claude builds something you want to keep, share, or put online as a real website, knowing your way around GitHub makes the whole process a lot less mysterious. So let's walk through it.
What you see when you arrive
GitHub lives at github.com. When you first visit, it looks like this:
Signing up is free. You need an email address and a password. That is genuinely it. You do not need to pay for anything, install anything, or understand what a "pull request" is. Not yet, anyway.
The five words you actually need
GitHub has its own vocabulary, and most of it you can ignore. But five words come up constantly, so let me translate them into English.
A project folder. All the files for one project, plus a full history of every change. That is all it is.
A saved change. Every time someone finishes a piece of work, they save it with a short note saying what they did. Like pressing "Save" in Word, but with a comment attached.
A copy of the project where you can try things without affecting the real version. Like making a photocopy of a document before scribbling on it.
Your own copy of someone else's project. You can change it however you like without touching the original.
A polite way of saying "I made some changes, would you like to add them to the real project?" You do not need to think about these yet.
What a project actually looks like
Here is a real project on GitHub. This one is called claude-cookbooks, and it is made by Anthropic (the company behind Claude). I have added some labels so you can see what is what.
Let me walk you through the numbered labels:
- The project name. It follows a pattern: the owner (anthropics), a slash, and the project name (claude-cookbooks). If someone says "check the repo," they mean go to this page.
- The Code button. This is how you download the project to your own computer. You will not need this often, but it is there.
- The file list. These are the files and folders in the project. It works exactly like the folders on your computer. Click a folder to see what is inside, click a file to read it.
- The About section. A short description of what the project does. This one says it is "a collection of notebooks and recipes for using Claude." Helpful for figuring out whether a project is relevant to you.
- The commit count. This project has 541 commits, meaning 541 saved changes over its lifetime. Every single one is recorded, so you could go back to any previous version if you needed to.
What "saved changes" look like
If you click on that commit count, you get a page like this:
Each row is one change. The text in bold is a short note someone wrote when they saved it, like "fix managed agents" or "bump SRE incident responder date." Underneath, you can see who made the change and when. The short code on the right (like "355d201") is a unique ID for that specific change. You can safely ignore it.
Notice that several of these commits were made by someone called "claude." That is not a person. That is Claude, the AI, making changes to its own cookbook. Which is a nice little example of the world we now live in.
Why this matters if you use Claude
If you are using Claude to build things, at some point you will want to do one or more of these:
- Keep a backup. If Claude builds you a website or a tool, putting the code on GitHub means it is safely stored somewhere that is not just your laptop.
- Put a website online. Services like Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and Vercel can take a GitHub repo and turn it into a live website automatically. This blog, for example, works exactly that way.
- Share your work. If you want to show someone what Claude built for you, a GitHub link is the standard way to do it.
- Let Claude work directly on your code. Claude Code (the command-line version) can read and write files in a GitHub repo directly. If that sounds exciting, you are further along than you think.
Getting started in five minutes
If you want to give it a go, here is all you need to do today:
- Go to github.com and click Sign up. Use your email, pick a username, done.
- Once you are in, search for anthropics/claude-cookbooks using the search bar at the top. Open it and have a look around. Click on folders. Click on files. Get a feel for how it works.
- Click on the commit count (the number next to the clock icon) and scroll through the history. Notice how every change is logged, who made it, and when.
That is genuinely all you need for now. You do not need to create your own repository today, or learn what branching means, or understand the command line. You just need to know that this place exists, what a repo looks like, and roughly what happens inside one.
When the time comes for Claude to build something that needs a proper home, you will know where to put it. And if you get stuck, you can always just ask Claude: "Can you walk me through setting up a GitHub repo for this project?" It is very good at that.