GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features.
It is very easy to join GitHub. To create an account go to: https://github.com/join and fill out the form. One of the hardest questions is going to be what is your username, with the many accounts already there finding a good username will be harder. Your email address can be any of your email addresses you want to use. Once you have an account created please do the following few steps:
- Send an email to Rob Kooper or Jonathan Angelo and ask to be added to the NCSA organization (http://github.com/ncsa)
- Optionally, add your @illinois.edu as one of your email addresses to GitHub
- Setup git correctly on your development machine, make sure the email you use, is the same as the email address that is associated with your GitHub account. This allows GitHub to associate your git commits with your GitHub account.
- git config --global user.name "Your Name Comes Here"
- git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.example.com
You are now ready to start working with GitHub. For a little information about GitHub see https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/, and for git see https://try.github.io/
If you have already used git, make sure you add the email address you used on your development machine to GitHub. This way any code that gets pushed to GitHub gets credited to your GitHub account.