GitHub and Git Set Up

• Sign-up for a free account on GitHub. When you register for a free individual GitHub account, request a student discount to obtain a few private repositories as well as unlimited public repositories. Please use something similar to FirstNameLastName as your username when you register with GitHub. For example, my username on GitHub is alanarnholt (all lowercase without spaces between the first and last name). If you have a popular name such as John Smith, you may need to provide some other distinguishing characteristic in your username. You will need to use your Appalachian State email when you register with GitHub both to be verified as a student and to have access to push your completed assignments to the class repository at https://github.com/STT3860-Sp24.

• Introduce yourself to Git using the RStudio Terminal. First, sign in to the RStudio/POSIT workbench at https://mathr.appstate.edu using your ASU credentials (the same username and password you use to login to your ASU email and other ASU accounts). Click on the Terminal tab located in the top of the bottom left pane of the workbench. Type the code below replacing ‘Jane Doe’ with your first and last name (middle initial is optional), and ‘doej@appstate.edu’ with your ASU email after the dollar prompts.

$ git config --global user.name 'Jane Doe'
$ git config --global user.email 'doej@appstate.edu'
$ git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=10000000'
$ git config --global --list

Your user.name is not necessarily your GitHub username although it can be. It should be a name so that other GitHub users recognize who it is that made commits, pushes, pull requests, etc. My user.name is my actual name (Alan T. Arnholt). The last command git config --global --list shows the values in your Git configuration file. Below is what mine looks like.

[arnholtat@new-mathr DataScience_2]$ git config --global --list
credential.helper=cache --timeout=10000000
user.email=arnholtat@appstate.edu
user.name=Alan T. Arnholt

When you type git config --global --list in the Terminal now, it should display the values you entered for the credential.helper, user.email, and user.name.

• Create a personal access token (PAT). Click on the Console tab in the bottom left pane of the POSIT workbench. Enter usethis::create_github_token() at the R prompt.

> usethis::create_github_token()

If you are not logged into GitHub, you will be prompted to login to your account. Then, a “New personal access token (classic)” window will open where you need to enter a word in the Note box (example: PositPAT) and change the value in the Expiration box. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the window after changing the values in the Note and Expiration boxes and click on the green Generate token. You should leave all other values in the “New personal access token (classic)” window at their default values. Place the token on the clipboard. Go back to the Console in the POSIT workbench and type:

gitcreds::gitcreds_set()

At the prompt, paste your token from the clipboard in the Console after the R prompt. You should be able to work with GitHub now, i.e. push and pull.