GitHub account

In CodeRefinery 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.

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.

We are trying to make it possible to follow this course also with other Git hosting services but this is work in progress.

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 CodeRefinery, 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.

If you want to try a bit more, then try to create a new repository and then remove the repository again.

If you prefer not using GitHub

If you prefer not to create a GitHub account, you can still follow along with the lessons. We highly recommend the GitHub account if you are in a interactive workshop, because we can’t support other platforms and a few exercises don’t work. If you are following CodeRefinery at your own pace, you will have time to work these out.

GitLab is a good alternative: https://gitlab.com or a local version.

  • Anything can be done with other web repositories, but we don’t say how. You will need to figure out where to click yourself.

  • Most Collaborative Git lesson exercises won’t work out of the box/will need adapting (but in principle the same idea exists with GitLab).

  • The continuous integration (CI) lessons such as documentation and software testing won’t work without adapting. With GitLab you need to provide your own CI runners, which is probably beyond the scope of what you would do just for this workshop.