A note on configuring access to github

[jsbrittain]

You can freely 'clone' (download) any public repository from github with only your login email and password. However, in 2021 github removed support for password authenication if you want to make changes to a repository, i.e. if you want to 'push' changes to github. Due to this, if we want to make changes to a repository we need setup a Personal Access Token between your computer and github. Thankfully this is a one-time process for each computer that you use.

The full instructions are available on the github support pages (which includes pictures of the relevant steps), but a brief overview is:

• On MacOS, open a Terminal and type ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[email protected]" (you can select the defaults for most questions, or add additional layers of security if you prefer). This creates a pair of tokens, one public and one private, that allow you to communicate securely with github.
• Copy the contents of ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub (note the 'pub' file extension, do not share the contents of the non-pub file) into the clipboard
• Navigate to Github, select Settings from the profile drop-down on the right. Then, select SSH and GPG keys from the menu on the left; click New SSH Key, give it a title (such as my-laptop) and paste the whole contents of ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub into the 'Key' field. Add the SSH key and you should be good to go.