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GitHub Setup

You will submit your code by pushing it to GitHub. Many actions on GitHub will require authenticating yourself—proving that you have access to your repositories—and the best way to do that involves an SSH key, a secret key that defines your identity, and an SSH agent, a program that remembers the identity so you don’t have to type your password all the time. Here’s how.

Creating a GitHub account

  1. Create a GitHub account if you don’t have one already.
  2. Create and/or configure an SSH key using GitHub’s instructions. Specifically:
    • Create the key (if you don’t have one already) using the ssh-keygen program.
    • Add the key to your GitHub account.
    • Test your SSH connection.

About SSH identities. An SSH identity is stored in two files, a public key with a name like /Users/yourname/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub  and a private key with a name like /Users/yourname/.ssh/id_ed25519. The private key is kept secret—you should never upload the private key to a shared service—while the public key can be uploaded anywhere you like, including your GitHub account. The public and private keys are a matched pair. Services like GitHub verify your identity using a mathematical protocol: your computer essentially proves that it has access to the private key corresponding to your public key, after which GitHub “knows” that your computer speaks for you.

If you use multiple computers to do your problem sets, you’ll need to configure an identity on each of these computers. You can do this either by creating and configuring multiple SSH keys (this is probably a little safer), or by copying the public and private keys between the computers (this is probably a little easier, though it’s important to get the file permissions correct).

Configuring Git

You should also tell your Git installation your name and email, if you haven’t already. This will ensure that you are recorded as the author of your code. For the user.email configuration, use your Harvard email.

$ git config --global user.name "FIRSTNAME LASTNAME"
$ git config --global user.email "YOUR@EMAIL"

Terminal sessions: A display like this represents a terminal session. To run the commands, you will open a terminal on your computer and then type (or copy and paste) each bold line into the terminal window, one at a time, pressing Return to run each command before going on to the next. The gray $ characters represent shell prompts and should not be copied, and blue lines represent command output.

Forking this repository

You will want to work on your own personal repository based off of this one. To this, you should fork this repository by hitting the Fork button on the top right. This will create your own copy of this repository.

Working with your own fork

You should now have your own copy of the algo-comp-2022 repository titled <username>/algo-comp-2022.

To create a local copy of this repository on your computer, copy the repository's SSH link by clicking the green Code button. This link should look like [email protected]:<username>/algo-comp-2022.git. Next, clone the repository to your computer:

$ git clone [email protected]:<username>/algo-comp-2022.git

Next, add harvard-datamatch/algo-comp-2022 as a remote repository. This will allow you to fetch future changes we may make. Make sure to also disable pushing to the remote.

$ cd algo-comp-2022
$ git remote add upstream [email protected]:harvard-datamatch/algo-comp-2022
$ git remote set-url --push upstream DISABLE

You can list all your remotes with

$ git remote -v

and should see

origin  [email protected]:<username>/algo-comp-2022.git (fetch)
origin  [email protected]:<username>/algo-comp-2022.git (push)
upstream  [email protected]:harvard-datamatch/algo-comp-2022.git (fetch)
upstream  DISABLE (push)

To push new changes to your repository, there are three primary steps:

$ git add file1 file2
$ git commit -m 'Some helpful message'
$ git push -u origin # After you initially push to origin, you can just type 'git push'

To pull changes from either origin or remote

$ git pull upstream main # Pull from harvard-datamatch repository
$ git pull # Pulls from origin by default

To view your Git status

$ git status

Resources

A lot of this article was pulled (no pun intended) from far better documented resources:

In addition, these pages might be helpful: