W3C on GitHub

Many W3C work groups conduct their work in Github, but not all. Please, explore our repos, watch, star, contribute.

The purpose of this page is to progressively list the resources useful when working on W3C projects using GitHub. The following links should help you find your way. Refer to the FAQ for details about the breadth and scope of W3C projects.

Repositories
If you are looking for a specific project that we maintain on GitHub, the best is to go straight to the list of repositories, which is searchable.
Repositories under the W3C organization may represent the work of Working Groups, Interest Groups, Community Groups, or Team projects, with varied status and formality. Documents and repositories should maintain their own status indicators.
Best practices and recommended tools
General guidelines, useful tools, tips.
Git recipes & tricks
Configuration, useful aliases and advice — specific for command-line Git.
GitHub Help
Most of the issues people have using GitHub are in fact due to git. General git and GitHub questions will not be addressed here. GitHub's own help site linked above is a very helpful resource. You can also usually just cut and paste from Stack Overflow's git questions. Eric Eggert conducted a training session about Git and GitHub (1h40′ video + slides).
FAQ
Introductory-level questions that are commonly asked about using GitHub specifically in a W3C context.
Using GitHub for Spec Work
A step-by-step guide to get up and running with a specification on GitHub, from Tobie.
Transfer a repository to the W3C GitHub organization
A guide to transfer a GitHub repository to the W3C organization.
Workflow for editors and other contributors
A guide for a clean and sane workflow for editors.
Contributor Management
If your group accepts contributions from a broad set of people through pull requests, this tool can help you make sure that the contributors have signed the requisite IPR agreements.
Automatic Publication from GitHub
In general, it is strongly recommended to use Echidna to publish TR documents rather than the manual path that goes through the Webmaster (assuming of course that your document is of a supported type). This document explains how to set up your repository using Travis CI in order to automatically publish on every commit (to a given branch) and never again have to worry about what people used to call “heartbeat” publications. With this, you can even get rid of the notion of Editor's Draft altogether.
Keeping Track with Midgard
Because work that happens on GitHub is spread out across many repositories, it can be challenging to remain informed about what's going on. Midgard helps there by filtering the data into mailboxes so that you can for instance get all the events for WebRTC repositories. Log in there with your W3C credentials, and just start using it. Note: it does not at this time have many filters and it is likely that your area of interest may not yet have one. If you wish to add one (which is easy) you should read the documentation on Pheme filters.
The w3c.json file
This is a small metadata file that is recommended for GitHub repositories under the w3c organisation.
Backup of GitHub organizations
How W3C keeps a backup of the different GitHub organizations