GitHub Repo Tutorial Generator

Here’s an idea from the Dev Ideas newsletter that could be fun to build.

When writing tutorials for creating demo projects, the source code of the project is often saved in a public repo on GitHub for people to look at. For example, this is a tutorial by Scotch.io showing you how to build a Meteor project: https://scotch.io/tutorials/building-a-slack-clone-in-meteor-js-getting-started. If you scroll down the page, there’s a “view code” button that takes you to a GitHub repo with the entire project: https://github.com/scotch-io/meteor-slack/tree/part1-getting-started. What’s cool is that they separate the project into branches for each part of the tutorial. This way the codebase is in the same state as that part of the tutorial.

It takes a bit of planning and/or git rebasing to get this branching system to turn out well. You could build an app that lets people do this more easily by entering which commit they want to pull out into its own branch.

You could also allow people to pull out their finished project into a “tutorial” branch and then squash the commits so each commit represents one part of the tutorial. An advantage to this is that it’s super simple to see the diff between two steps in the tutorial so you can see exactly what you need to change to get to the next step.

This could be implemented with a web app or desktop app with a nice interface to make the process simpler. You could also make it a command line application that abstracts the git rebasing process by giving you simple commands to achieve this.

Please click the “recommend” button if you liked this idea! If you want to chat about this, send me a tweet at @rjun07a. You can also subscribe to the Dev Ideas newsletter for five ideas like this every week.