git

We assume all students have installed git version 2 or newer, and have run the following commands once or twice before in their lives:

git config
git init
git status
git add
git commit

If not, please install git then spend a bit more time going over the prerequisite reading, at the end.

GitHub

We also assume all students have a GitHub account and have browsed around a repository on GitHub before (like this one!)

[!TIP] If you're creating an account for the first time, we recommend adding your university email and a personal one. You'll want your GitHub account to outlive your PhD.

Optionally, you can install the GitHub CLI you might find it easier to authenticate, and it's pretty useful to have it around when working with GitHub.

Technical setup

If you've not already done so, configure git so it:

  1. knows your name (or username);
  2. knows your email address; and
  3. is authenticated to push to GitHub.

[!TIP] You can use your real name and email address for 1 and 2, or you can use your GitHub username and anonymised GitHub "noreply" email if you're concerned about privacy.

For thing number 3 you can either use HTTPS (which GitHub recommend) or SSH. During your PhD you'll probably encounter SSH so there's no harm in doing it that way:

Example commands (click to expand)

If you've never done these setup steps before your terminal history should look something like:

git config --global user.name "Joe Bloggs"
git config --global user.email "jbexample@users.noreply.github.com"

ls ~/.ssh  # check for existing keys and ssh config, then...
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "jbloggs@ucl.ac.uk"
touch ~/.ssh/config
echo """Host github.com
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  UseKeychain yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519""" > ~/.ssh/config
pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub  # copy your public key to the clipboard

And then you should have pasted the key into your GitHub account (Settings » SSH and GPG keys » Add new ...).

Technical setup pre-lesson check

To check you've done all of the technical prerequisite steps please run:

git --version  # should show version 2.something
git config --global --list  # should at least show user.name and user.email
ssh -T git@github.com  # should say "Hi <you>! You've successfully authenticated..."

If you installed the GitHub CLI:

gh auth status  # should show a check mark: ✓ Logged in to github.com

Reading

Yes, there's a bit of prerequisite reading!

Either:

We're going to assume you've read -- or are familiar with:

If you find one of them hard to understand, swap to the other one! If you've used git and GitHub before you should be able to skim-read these quite quickly. If you're already power-git user: please come to the session anyway and help out!