Interaction with GitHub

Get an account on GitHub

To set up an account on GitHub, follow these general steps:

  1. Go to the GitHub website at https://github.com/.
  2. Click on the “Sign up” button on the top right corner of the page.
  3. Enter your preferred username, email address, and password in the provided fields.
  4. Choose whether you want to receive updates and announcements via email.
  5. Complete the verification process by solving a puzzle and entering a verification code sent to your email.

You will be able to upgrade to a paid level of service, apply discounts, join organizations, etc. in the future, so don’t fret about any of that now. Except your username. You might want to give that some thought.

A few tips, which sadly tend to contradict each other:

  • Incorporate your actual name! People like to know who they’re dealing with. Also makes your username easier for people to guess or remember.
  • Reuse your username from other contexts, e.g., Twitter or Slack. But, of course, someone with no GitHub activity will probably be squatting on that.
  • Pick a username you will be comfortable revealing to your future boss.
  • Shorter is better than longer.
  • Be as unique as possible in as few characters as possible. In some settings GitHub auto-completes or suggests usernames.
  • Make it timeless. Don’t highlight your current university, employer, or place of residence, e.g. JennyFromTheBlock.
  • Avoid words laden with special meaning in programming.
  • Avoid the use of upper vs. lower case to separate words. We highly recommend all lowercase. GitHub treats usernames in a case insensitive way, but using all lowercase is kinder to people doing downstream regular expression work with usernames, in various languages. A better strategy for word separation is to use a hyphen -.

You can change your username later, but better to get this right the first time.

Setup a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT)

Here are the step-by-step instructions to set up a GitHub personal access token:

Warning

Treat your access tokens like passwords and keep them secure (e.g. a password managing software).

  1. Log in to your GitHub account.
  2. Click on your profile picture in the top-right corner of the page.
  3. Select “Settings” from the dropdown menu.
  4. In the left sidebar, click on “Developer settings”.
  5. Click on “Personal access tokens”.
  6. Click on “Tokens (classic)”.
  7. Click on “Generate new token” and from the dropdown menu select “Generate new token (classic)”.
  8. In the “Note” field, give your token the name: GITHUB_PAT
  9. Under Expiration, select “No expiration”
  10. Under “Select scopes”, select: repo, workflow, user
  11. Click on “Generate token”.
  12. Your personal access token will be displayed on the screen. Copy it and store it in a safe place.