GitHub account

In this workshop, we use the public GitHub service and you need an account at https://github.com and a supported web browser. Basic GitHub accounts are free.

Why GitHub

We will do this exercise on GitHub but also GitLab and Bitbucket allow similar workflows and basically everything that we will discuss is transferable. With this material and these exercises we do not endorse the company GitHub. We have chosen to demonstrate a number of concepts using examples with GitHub because it is currently the most popular web platform for hosting Git repositories and the chance is high that you will interact with GitHub-based repositories even if you choose to host your Git repository on another platform.

We also encourage course participants to use our new Nordic research software repository platform hosted in Denmark, for more information see https://coderefinery.org/repository/.

If you are concerned about the personal information to reveal to GitHub, for example how to keep your email address private, please review these instructions for keeping your email address private provided at GitHub.

Create a GitHub account

  1. Go to https://github.com.

  2. Click on the “Sign up” at the right-top corner.

  3. Enter your username of your choice (if it is already used, you will get some suggestions), email address, and password.

  4. Follow further instruction and verify your account.

GitHub may require you to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA). This is generally a good thing, but may take some time to set up. Luckily, you probably don’t have to do this immediately. If you are prompted to enable MFA before the end of the workshop, follow GitHub’s instructions since they are usually pretty good.

How to verify that this worked

If you can log in to https://github.com, you should be good to go.