• Setup and Configuration

The first thing you need to do is set up a free user account. Simply visit https://github.com, choose a user name that isn’t already taken, provide an email address and a password, and click the big green “Sign up for GitHub” button.

As of right now, you’re fully able to connect with Git repositories using the https:// protocol, authenticating with the username and password you just set up. However, to simply clone public projects, you don’t even need to sign up – the account we just created comes into play when we fork projects and push to our forks a bit later.

• If you’d like to use SSH remotes, you’ll need to configure a public key. If you don’t already have one, see Generating Your SSH Public Key. Open up your account settings using the link at the top-right of the window:

• Then select the “SSH keys” section along the left-hand side.

• From there, click the “Add an SSH key” button, give your key a name, paste the contents of your ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (or whatever you named it) public-key file into the text area, and click “Add key”.