Before we create the repository let’t take a look the URL I mentioned in the previous para: https://github.com/fastn-stack/fastn-template. These things are called URL, which is short of Uniform Resource Locator. Look at another URL, URL of this book https://fastn.com/book/. You should start paying attention to the URL, it’s “structure”, as we are going to be building web applications and websites in this book, and they are all about creating such URLs.

A URL has a “scheme”, here the scheme is https. https stands for “secure HTTP”, and HTTP is the “internet protocol” that your web-browser uses to communicate with the the “web-server” hosting the website. There is another internet protocol, identified by the scheme http which is very common. http and https are losly grouped into a single name, http, and very few people call things https, e.g. typically a server would be called http server, and it supports https, instead of calling it https server. HTTPS is secure, so you should always be on a lookout for https URLs. But http is “simple”, so when doing local web development, you will often not use https and use http.

Sometimes you will come across URLs without scheme, eg google.com. This is technically not a valid URL, but is common enough that a lot of applications, like your webbrowser understands that you mean https://google.com when you type google.com.

Since HTTPS, the secure version of http came out later, earlier when you saw a URL without scheme, most applications assumed you meant http://google.com. Now HTTPS is starting to gain widespread adoption, so more and more sites and applications prefer https by default now.

You should be aware of the distinction though. And this may be your first lesson, if you want to become programmer, you have to pay a lot of attention to minute details. Programmers create “robust applications”, means users of programs are sheilded from such minute details, but this has trained users to not pay too much attention to details. But these details matter.

Let’s look at the URL of the template repository once again: https://github.com/fastn-stack/fastn-template, the URL uses https, so it is secure. The next part is the “domain”, github.com in this case.

the github.com part tells you that this repo is on Github. Then comes the fastn-stack part, which is our “account name”. When you created your account on Github, you must have picked a username, your username would be your account name. And finally the fastn-template part, which is the “name” of the repo.