Clone a Repository from GitHub

This page is provided as a reference, primarily for people who are not using GitHub Classroom. If you are using GitHub Classroom, you should skip this section. Instead, you should follow the instructions provided by your instructor to get on to GitHub Classroom and start the first assignment, which will copy the repository you need to your GitHub account.

Clone a Repository Using GitHub Desktop

Although you can clone a GitHub repository from within VS Code, it’s a lot easier to do it using GitHub Desktop. If you don’t already have GitHub Desktop installed, you can download it from desktop.github.com. Once you have it installed, open it up and log in to your GitHub account.

Note

Before you clone a repository, read this! GitHub Desktop by default creates a folder in your Documents folder to store cloned repositories. If your Documents folder is tied to a cloud storage service like Apple’s iCloud or Microsoft’s OneDrive, using the Documents folder for GitHub repositories can create all kinds of problems. This is because those cloud services will often save space on your computer by removing the content of files from your computer, storing them in the cloud, and then downloading them when you need them. If you try to synchronize a local repository with GitHub and your cloud service has offloaded files to the cloud, then the content of those files will be lost. This is bad. So, if you are using a cloud storage service, you should create a new folder for your GitHub repositories that is not in your Documents folder. For example, you could create a folder called GitHub in your home directory (i.e., beside your Documents folder, not inside it), and use that instead.

Next, find the repository you want to clone on GitHub’s website. To get the github-starter-course repository that we’re starting with in this book, you can use the following URL: neural-data-science/github-starter-course. Once you’re on the repository’s page, click the green Code button, and select Open with GitHub Desktop. This will open GitHub Desktop and prompt you to choose a location on your computer to save the repository (the default is Documents/GitHub — see note about about why this location can be problematic). Once you’ve chosen a location, click Clone. This will download the repository from GitHub and save it to your computer.

Open the Cloned Repository in VS Code

Now that you’ve cloned the repository, you can open it in VS Code. Open VS Code and click File -> Open... from the menu. Navigate to the folder where you saved the repository, and click Open. This will open the repository in VS Code. Now you can edit the files in the repository, and commit and push your changes to GitHub.

At this point you can jump back to the Open the Repository in VS Code page and continue from there.