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Create a GitHub account

Make your github account

GitHub is service which manages the “social” part of git. It empowers you to make copies of other people work (with attribution!), contribute to other peoples work in a way that they are in control of what is incorporated, and equally accept contributions to your work, all with the magic of version control.

GitHub is free to use for individuals and companies/organisations/teams. There are limits on the amount of storage in private repositories, but there are paid plans available where these are necessary for private development.

Make your GitHub account

To create a GitHub account, got to github.com and sign up for a free account.

Side note on objections to GitHub

GitHub is owned by Microsoft and your data are maintained on Microsoft’s infrastructure. By using GitHub you confer certain rights to Microsoft, but you retain legal responsibility for your content. Read more about this in GitHub’s terms of service.

Some people object to the use of GitHub on the basis that it is not open source (you cannot recreate it as a complete tool yourself) and that it is a for-profit platform owned by a multinational trillion dollar corporation.

These are all very reasonable objections which I am sympathetic to. Unfortunately the ubiquity of GitHub in my discipline means that deviating from this platform and moving to alternatives (like self hosted instances of GitLab) would effectively exclude me from participating in important areas of work and development. This is an unfortunate and complex situation, and I’m interested to follow the debate from the position of a humble user.