Creating Repositories

Making a new Repository

If you don’t already have a repository for your project folder, it’s fairly straightforward to make one.

First, locate your playtest folder in your hard drive. I’ve named mine “repo practice”.

Next, go to GitHub Desktop and select “Add an Existing Repository from your local drive… ”

(source: zoewillowz)

Select your repository.

You’ll get the following alert:

Click “create a repository”.

You’ll get the following window. (Your filepath will be grayed out). Fill it out. You don’t need to initialize a README, select a license, or add a Git ignore.

Then click “Create repository”! After a while of loading, you’ll get the following window.

Now all you need to do is publish this repository to GitHub, which enables you to share it with others and back it up. To do that, simply click the button at the top!

Cloning a Repository

If instead of making your own repository, you’re being added to someone else’s repository, you’re going to need to clone a repository from the internet.

If you’ve already been added to the repository (see the Collaboration section for how to do that) adding your new repository should be a breeze.

On the GitHub Desktop main page, click “Clone a repository from the Internet…”

The following window will pop up.

Select the repository that you want to clone from the list (if your GitHub account is new, the list shouldn’t be that long haha), then set your local path to wherever you want the folder to be and click “Clone.”

If, for some reason, the repository is not visible in the selection window, open it in your browser and copy the link. The repository page will look something like this:

Copy the link from the search bar.

In the repository selection window, click the “URL” tab. Then, paste in the repository link and click “Clone”.

(Note: Putting the parallels repo link in your GitHub and trying to clone it won’t work. Even by URL, GitHub checks to make sure that the repository you’re trying to clone is one you have access to. You still need to have it shared with you or accessible to you if you’re trying to clone it by URL.)

Once you click “Clone”, it’ll redirect you to the following window.

(I didn’t clone the parallels repository because I already have it downloaded to my computer.)

Ensure that you have a stable internet connection, because what this is essentially doing is downloading the entire project from online, where GitHub hosts it.

Wait for the entire repository to download. One it’s done, it’ll take you to the following window:

And that’s it! This is the main window in GitHub Desktop, and you can access your repository, commit, push, pull, and more from here.

But what do you do now? How do you use GitHub?