GitHub Classroom

If you are taking this course for credit at Dalhousie University, you need to follow the instructions in this document to set up your GitHub account and join the course organization.

If you are reading the textbook as an independent learner, you can still obtain all of the course materials for free, but the instructions are slightly different. See the independent learner instructions for more information. However, if you are a Dalhousie student, be sure to work from the GiHub classroom, because that is also where you will receive and submit assignments. Also, some of the materials may be updated specifically for the course, before they are updated in the textbook.

Prerequisites

Before you can do the steps here, you need to have already created a GitHub account, and installed both GitHub Desktop and VS Code.

Find your GitHub Classroom

To access the GitHub classroom for this course, find the link provided by your instructor on the course LMS (Brightspace). Click that link and follow the instructions to link your GitHub account to the classroom. As discussed before, it’s required that your GitHub account shows your real name, so that your instructor can identify you.

Once you have joined the classroom, you will see a list of lessons and assignments. Each assignment will have a link to a GitHub repository. Click the link for the first assignment, which is called Github starter course. You will be taken to a page that asks you to select your name. Select it if it appears, otherwise you can continue without selecting your name. You’ll then see a page that tells you it’s cloning the GitHub Starter Course repository. Refresh the page until you see the message, “You’re ready to go!”. You should see two options at that point: one is a link to github.com, and the other is a button that says Open in Visual Studio Code. We’ll use the button later, but for now let’s click the web link to see what a repository looks like in its native environment, on the GitHub website.