Intro to Git and GitHub GitHub Fundamentals

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able to create and clone a GitHub repository and open it in VS Code.

Creating a repository

Here are the steps to creating a new repository on GitHub:

There are two primary ways to get to the new repository page. You can use the dropdown menu from the main nav bar:

If you’re on your GitHub profile page, you can alternatively click on the repositories tab and select the New button:

⚠ If you have never made a repository, you will not have a repository tab yet!

Be sure that you select an appropriate name for the repository. Many organizations use lower-kebab-case for their repo names, but there are no strict rules for repo names, except they must only contain ASCII letters, digits, and the characters ., -, and _.

If you plan to share this project with others (for example, if you will submit it as part of an assignment), make sure the repository is set to Public:

Also, make sure that none of the following options are selected:

These options can be useful later, but for now, do not use them while you are still learning the basics.

When you’ve entered these items, click the Create repository button:

You now have a remote repository on GitHub!

Cloning a repository

Cloning allows us to take the current version of a project from a remote repository on GitHub and copy it into a local repository on your computer.

You’ll follow these steps any time you want to make a copy of a project that already exists on GitHub.

Step 1

Navigate to the parent directory where you want the cloned directory to exist:

cd ~/code/ga/lectures

Step 2

Using the URL from GitHub, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/<original-author>/my-project.git

Do not copy the above command. It will not work. Your username will replace <original-author> in the URL above. Also make sure my-project.git matches the name that you gave the repo when you were creating it

🧠 When you clone a repository, a directory matching the repository’s name on GitHub will be created automatically.

For example, when we clone the my-project repo, all the files in that repo will be copied into a new my-project directory. This directory will be in our ~/code/ga/lectures directory.

Step 3

Navigate into the new directory and open it in VS Code:

cd my-project
code . 

🧠 When you clone a repository, an origin remote will automatically be set using the URL you used to clone it. You can confirm this with the git remote -v command. If you’ve cloned a repository that you don’t own (or have write access to), you won’t be able to push changes!