Your first time with git and github
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.





