git and GitHub

Published

2025-07-11

Objectives
  • Learn how to use git with command-line instructions.
  • Learn how to do version control with git.
  • Understand the differences between git and GitHub.
  • Use GitHub to collaborate with others on a project.

Prerequisites

The following should be done before doing the exercises below.

GitHub ssh keys

In exercises 2 and 3 you will be using GitHub to “push” and “pull” commits between your local computer and GitHub’s servers. This requires authentication to be setup. For these purposes we suggest using ssh keys. To set that up, follow the instructions here:

Git configuration

Before doing the exercises in this session, you’ll need to tell git what your name and email are, so that it creates commits with the appropriate author information. To do that, open a terminal and run the following (it doesn’t matter which directory you run these from), but replacing YOUR NAME with your name and YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS with your email address:

git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"
git config --global user.email "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS"

For entering longer commit messages (you’ll learn what this means in Exercise 1) we’ll need to tell git what text editor to use. By default git will use vim, which can be tricky to understand for new users. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll use the more user-friendly nano. To do that, run the following in your terminal:

git config --global core.editor nano
Note

If you wish to reset to the default editor after the tutorial is over, run:

git config --global --unset-all core.editor

Exercises

  • Exercise1: Practice with git on a local repository
  • Exercise2: git and GitHub
  • Exercise3: Collaborating in GitHub using the Fork and Pull Model
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