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Your first time with git and github

2 min readMar 22, 2023

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If you’ve never used git or github before, there are a bunch of things that you need to do. It’s very well explained on github, but repeated here for completeness.

Get a github account.

Download and install git.

Set up git with your user name and email.

Open a terminal/shell and type:

  • $ git config --global user.name "Your name here" $ git config --global user.email "your_email@example.com"

(Don’t type the $; that just indicates that you’re doing this at the command line.)

I also do:

  • $ git config --global color.ui true $ git config --global core.editor emacs

The first of these will enable colored output in the terminal; the second tells git that you want to use emacs.

Set up ssh on your computer. I like Roger Peng’s guide to setting up password-less logins. Also see github’s guide to generating SSH keys.

Look to see if you have files ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

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If not, create such public/private keys: Open a terminal/shell and type:

  • $ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"

Copy your public key (the contents of the newly-created id_rsa.pub file) into your clipboard. On a Mac, in the terminal/shell, type:

  • $ pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Paste your ssh public key into your github account settings.

  • Go to your github Account Settings
  • Click “SSH Keys” on the left.
  • Click “Add SSH Key” on the right.
  • Add a label (like “My laptop”) and paste the public key into the big text box.

In a terminal/shell, type the following to test it:

  • $ ssh -T git@github.com

If it says something like the following, it worked:

  • Hi username! You've successfully authenticated, but Github does not provide shell access.

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