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Setting up your own GitHub Account

Approved for: Fall 2024

In this tutorial, we will walk you through creating your own GitHub account, creating a private repository (so your code won't be publicly visible on the web), and cloning and pushing content to your private, online repository.

Note: You should never create a public repository for work that you are doing for a class.

Setting up an Account

As students, you receive free access to GitHub Pro while you are a student. To set up your account:

  1. Make a normal GitHub account using your @uga.edu email address here: https://github.com/join 
  2. Go to the Education Pack "join page" on GitHub: https://education.github.com/pack/join
  3. Click on "Get your Pack".
  4. Click on “Get Student Benefits” and Sign In with your Account, if needed.
  5. Fill out the form and submit it for review
  6. Wait for email confirmation from GitHub. Hopefully, this will take less than a day.

Setting up SSH Keys

Before you can push and pull to private repositories hosted on GitHub from your Odin account, you will need to create an SSH public/private key pair on Odin. This will allow you to give a public key to GitHub (think of it as a padlock) that GitHub can use to authenticate your requests in addition to or instead of your GitHub username and password. It's sufficient to think of this key-based authentication process as you unlocking the public key (i.e., the padlock) using your private key -- the Git program will do this with GitHub so long as the key pair is set up correctly.

  1. Login to Odin.

  2. Before you type the following command, please note that it will prompt you to answer questions.

    • Do NOT change any values when prompted -- simply press return until the ssh-keygen command is finished executing.
    • When asked for a password, simply press return -- do not enter a password.

    With all of that in mind, please execute the command below, replacing your_email@uga.edu with your @uga.edu email address.

    $ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@uga.edu"

    This creates a public/private key pair in the default location: ~/.ssh/.

  3. View your public key using cat and copy its output to your clipboard (usually by selecting the text in your terminal, then right-clicking on the selection and clicking "Copy"):

    $ cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

  4. log in to GitHub.

  5. In the upper-right corner of any page, click your profile photo, then click Settings.

  6. In the user settings sidebar, click SSH and GPG keys.

  7. Click New SSH key or Add SSH key.

  8. In the "Title" field, add a descriptive label for the new key. For example, if you're adding a key for your Odin account, then you might call this key "Odin".

  9. Paste your key into the "Key" field. This should be the copied output from your prior call to cat.

  10. Click Add SSH key.

  11. If prompted, confirm your GitHub password.

  12. On Odin, verify that your key pair is setup correctly by trying to SSH to git@github.com (do not change the username):

    $ ssh git@github.com

    • You may see something like the following:

      The authenticity of host 'github.com (www.xxx.yyy.zzz)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is ...
...
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

      Type yes, then press return. It may emit the following warning, but that's okay and to be expected:

      Warning: Permanently added 'bitbucket.org,...`

    • If you see something similar to the following, then you should be okay to proceed:

      PTY allocation request failed on channel 0
Hi <YourGitHubUsername>! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.
Connection to github.com closed.

    • If you see the following, then something went wrong:

      Permission denied (publickey).

Creating a Repository

  1. Log in to GitHub
  2. Click on "New" under the repositories section on the left-hand side of the page.
  3. You should see a screen similar to the image below. Type cs1302-testRepo as the name of your repository, click the "private" radio button and then press the "Create Repository" button.

Create Repo

  1. Once you've clicked the "Create Repository" button, your repository is created but still needs to be set up. GitHub should be showing a website that gives you a few options on how to set up your repository. Instead of following those instructions directly, we will set up our repository from Odin using the following commands:

    1. Clone your repository on Odin using git clone git@github.com:username/cs1302-testRepo.git replacing username with your GitHub username. You may get a message saying you've cloned an empty repository. That's okay! You should now have a folder called cs1302-testRepo.

    2. Change into the cs1302-testRepo directory.

    3. Check the status of your local repository using git status.

      NOTE: Take note of the branch name displayed in the output (i.e., the <name> in On branch <name>).

    4. If the current branch name is not main, then rename it to main using git branch -M main.

      NOTE: The -M option moves/renames a branch and the corresponding reflog. Historically, master is the name that many versions of git use for the first branch that is automatically created via git init. In 2020, the Git development community and its partners reflected on the fact that the word "master" has negative connotations for many groups of people and started encouraging the use of more inclusive branch names such as main. You can read more about it here and here. Future versions of git may adopt

    5. Create an initial README file using echo "# cs1302-testRepo" >> README.md.

    6. Add your README file to the repository using git add README.md.

    7. Commit your changes using git commit -am "first commit".

    8. Push your changes to GitHub using git push -u origin main

      NOTE: The -u or --set-upstream option sets the upstream information for your current branch in your local instance of the repository. If git push -u origin main is successful, then argument-less git pull, git push, and other commands will be enabled for your local repository. That is, if a remote repository name and branch (or refspec) are expected but not provided, then many commands will simply default to the upstream information. You are encouraged to read git help push for more information about upstreams and refspecs. The next time you need to push or pull to origin main, you can simply use argument-less git push or git pull, respectively.

      ERROR: If the push fails and you see error: src refspec main does not match any and/or error: failed to push some refs to ..., then it is very likely that your local repository is empty (i.e., its commit log is empty) -- you can verify this using git log.

      • If you're following this tutorial for the first time and your commit log is empty, then that means you skipped one or more of the previous three steps. Attempt to repeat the steps that you're missing before executing git push -u origin main again.
      • If you're replicating the steps in this tutorial for a new repository, then simply stage and commit some files to the repository before executing git push -u origin main again.

    9. Refresh your GitHub page to see the changes to the repository. Your repository should look similar to the below image. Note the number of commits (1 so far) to this repository, the latest commit time, and the contents of the README file are all shown on GitHub.

Test Repo

  1. Now that your repository is set up, let's get some more practice. On Odin, do the following:
    1. Open your README.md file.
    2. Type a few additional sentences.
    3. Commit your changes locally.
    4. Push your changes to GitHub.
    5. Refresh the GitHub page to make sure your changes have been added to the online repository.
    6. Delete the entire cs1302-testRepo folder from Odin.
    7. Wait. Delete my entire project from Odin?!? Yep, do it.
    8. Execute the git clone command from above. And it's back!
    9. Note: you could clone from any machine that has git installed. You've all been cloning cs1302 GitHub repositories all semester.

Congratulations on becoming a member of GitHub!

License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Copyright © Michael E. Cotterell, Brad Barnes, and the University of Georgia. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License to students and the public. The content and opinions expressed on this Web page do not necessarily reflect the views of nor are they endorsed by the University of Georgia or the University System of Georgia.