Getting started with GitHub

Please complete the following two tasks before March 1 and contact us (rise@unibas.ch) in case of problems. (We assume that you have completed these tasks if we don’t hear from you and we won’t have time during the course to fix any problems related to these two tasks.)

Configure your GitHub Pro account

There is a difference in functionality between GitHub Free and GitHub Pro accounts. For example, GitHub Free accounts cannot use GitHub pages.

Task 1

As a student, you can get a free GitHub Pro account:

1. Sign up at https://github.com/ with your university email and choose GitHub Free.
2. Verify your email.
3. Fill in your billing information with your full legal name as it appears on your academic affiliation documentation. (You do not have to add a payment method.)
4. Go to https://education.github.com/benefits and get a free upgrade to GitHub Pro by following the prompts.

Connect to GitHub

There are various ways in which you can interact with GitHub. In this course, we limit ourselves to the following:

1. The web-interface on https://github.com/ in your browser.
2. GitHub Desktop.

Task 2

Please install GitHub Desktop on your machine.

If you want to use your IDE instead of GitHub Desktop, you are free to do so, but we can only offer limited support, namely for PyCharm or RStudio.

Useful links

• GitHub documentation
• GitHub Desktop documentation