GitHub Setup

GitHub Setup Tutorial

GitHub is an especially useful tool to share code in a secure manner by providing a two-step process to uploading and downloading code from the internet. Instead of repositories automatically updating on a PC, someone has to first "pull" the new updates to the code. When uploading new code, a user first state the changes made before pushing to the main repo.

Step 1: Creating the repository on github.com

First, go to GitHub.com and create an account.

Once you have created an account, click the green "New" button on the top-left corner as show in the image on the right.

Once the "Create a new repository" page appears, enter a repository name. Here you can include a description and choose whether to make it public or private. Here I chose Public. Also make sure to checkmark the box for "Add a README file" off to prevent issues since the repo will be blank otherwise.

Next, navigate to a local folder in which you would like to save the repo and its contents over time. Here I chose my Documents folder and created a GitHub folder within it. Open a terminal window and cd into this folder as well.

Type in "git clone REPO_URL" and hit enter

Replace REPO_URL with the URL of your newly created GitHub repository.

To commit a file, try using a test file. Here I cd into the repo and created a test.txt file using VIM and adding a sentence in the file as well. Afterwards, I type "git add .", then "git commit", and the I type in a commit message "Uploading test document". Finally I type "git push" to push the changes.

Here we can see the uploaded file as well as the commit message. Opening the .txt will then show us the contents.

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