With Git covered locally, it’s time to connect that work to GitHub — the place where you can back up your projects online, showcase them publicly to anyone, and eventually collaborate smoothly with other developers. This guide walks through creating an account and your very first repository.
If you’ve worked through our guide on what Git is, you already understand the local side of version control. GitHub adds a hosted, online layer on top of that — a place where your Git repositories live remotely, visible to you (and optionally to others) from any computer.
Creating a GitHub Account
According to GitHub’s official account creation guide, signing up is done directly at github.com, and you’ll be asked to verify your email address during the process — without a verified email, some basic GitHub tasks, including creating a repository, won’t be available yet.
- Go to github.com and click “Sign up.”
- Enter your email address, create a password, and choose a username.
- Verify your email address using the confirmation GitHub sends you.
- Once verified, you’ll land on your new account’s dashboard.
GitHub’s own documentation strongly recommends configuring two-factor authentication (2FA) once your account is set up — an extra layer of security worth taking a few minutes to enable early, since it protects code and history you may end up relying on for years.
Choosing a Good Username
Your GitHub username becomes part of your public profile URL and, for many developers, becomes something like a professional handle over time — visible on every public repository, comment, and contribution you make going forward. It’s worth choosing something reasonably professional and easy to remember, rather than a throwaway nickname, since changing it later can affect existing links to your profile and repositories.
What a Repository Actually Is
According to GitHub’s quickstart guide for repositories, a repository is essentially a project folder that GitHub tracks — containing your files, along with the complete history of changes made to them over time. Each repository is typically dedicated to a single project or piece of work.
Creating Your First Repository
- Click the “+” icon in the top-right corner of any GitHub page, then select “New repository.”
- Give it a short, descriptive name — no spaces; use hyphens instead, like
my-first-project. - Add an optional description explaining what the project is.
- Choose whether it should be Public (visible to anyone) or Private (visible only to you and people you invite).
- Check the box to “Add a README file” — a good habit from your very first repository onward.
- Click “Create repository.”
That’s it — you now have a working GitHub repository, complete with version history starting from this first commit.
What a README File Is For
A README is a text file, typically named README.md, that describes what a project is and how to use it. GitHub automatically displays its contents on the repository’s main page, which makes it the first thing anyone (including future you) sees when visiting the project. Even a short README — a project name, a one-sentence description, and maybe how to run it — is far more useful than none at all, and it’s a genuinely good habit worth building from your very first repository onward.
Connecting a Local Git Project to GitHub
If you already have a project tracked locally with Git — following the workflow from our Git basics guide — you can connect it to a new, empty GitHub repository with a few additional commands:
git remote add origin https://github.com/your-username/your-repo-name.git
git branch -M main
git push -u origin mainThis tells your local Git repository where its remote counterpart lives on GitHub, renames your default branch to “main” (the modern standard), and pushes your existing commit history up to GitHub for the first time. After this initial push, future updates only need a simple git push.
Public vs. Private Repositories
As freeCodeCamp’s introduction to Git and GitHub explains, GitHub lets developers store their repositories on their platform and collaborate with others from any location — and repository visibility controls exactly who can see that collaboration happening. Public repositories are visible to anyone and are commonly used to showcase work, contribute to open source, or simply share code freely. Private repositories are visible only to you and anyone you explicitly invite, useful for work in progress or anything not ready to share yet.
For learning projects and a beginner portfolio, public repositories are usually the better default — they let you build a visible record of your progress that others (including potential employers) can actually see.
A Realistic First Project
A genuinely good first repository doesn’t need to be impressive — it just needs to exist. A simple option: take one of the small practice scripts you wrote while working through the Python or JavaScript guides in this series, create a repository for it, add a short README explaining what it does, and push it up. This gives you real, hands-on practice with the exact workflow you’ll use for every project going forward and beyond, using code you’ve already written and understand rather than a disposable throwaway example that means nothing to you.
Viewing and Editing Files Directly on GitHub
You don’t always need to work from the command line to make small changes. GitHub’s web interface lets you view, edit, and even create new files directly in the browser — click into any file in a repository, then use the edit (pencil) icon to make a change, write a short commit message describing what you changed, and commit directly from the page itself. This is genuinely useful for quick fixes, like correcting a typo in a README, without needing to open your local project just for a single one-line change that hardly seems worth the full local workflow.
Organizing Multiple Projects
As you build more projects, a natural question comes up: should everything live in one repository, or should each project get its own separate one? The general convention is one repository per distinct project — a Python script here, a small web page there, each in its own dedicated repository rather than mixed together. This keeps each project’s history focused and makes it far easier for someone (including future you) to understand what a given repository actually contains just from reading its name and README file alone.
Common Questions Beginners Ask About GitHub
Do I need a GitHub account to use Git? No — Git works entirely locally on your own computer without any account. GitHub becomes necessary only once you want to back up your work remotely or collaborate with others.
Should my first repositories be public or private? Public is generally recommended for learning projects, since a visible history of small, real projects is genuinely useful to show growth over time — even projects that feel unpolished are worth having publicly visible.
What if I make a mistake in a public repository — can everyone see it? Yes, but this is completely normal and not something to worry about. Every developer’s GitHub history includes messy early commits and mistakes; it’s part of what makes a genuine learning history look credible rather than staged.
Do I need to pay for a GitHub account? No — GitHub’s free tier includes unlimited public and private repositories for personal use, which is more than enough for learning projects and most individual work for a long time.
What happens if I delete a repository by accident? GitHub requires typing the repository’s full name to confirm deletion specifically to prevent accidental removal, and deletion is permanent — there’s no built-in recycle bin, so it’s worth pausing before confirming any deletion, especially for repositories with real work in them.
Quick-Reference GitHub Basics Guide
- GitHub account — created at github.com, requires email verification.
- Repository — a project folder tracked by Git, hosted on GitHub.
- README.md — a description file automatically shown on the repository’s main page.
- git remote add origin — connects a local Git project to a GitHub repository.
- git push — uploads your local commits to GitHub.
- Public vs. private — controls who can see a repository’s contents.
Conclusion
Creating a GitHub account and your first repository takes only a few minutes, but it opens up genuinely important capabilities: remote backup, a visible project history, and the foundation for eventually collaborating with other developers. Starting with small, real projects — even simple ones — builds both the habit and a genuine portfolio you can point to later when explaining what you’ve built and learned.
With Git and GitHub now covered, the version control foundation from this series is genuinely complete — the same skills apply directly to every project you build going forward, whether it’s Python, JavaScript, or any other language or framework you decide to pick up next.
In the next guide in this series, we’ll cover essential VS Code extensions that pair well with the languages and tools covered throughout this series, rounding out a genuinely complete beginner setup from editor to version control.
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When not writing, Alex is probably debugging someone else’s code.