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.

  • 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.
    

Next: Typical use