Authenticating and Installing

Installing Git

Ask IT to install Git or GitHub Desktop. The later is more useful since you will get a good Git GUI and Git bundled together.

Git and RStudio

In order for RStudio to use Git, it needs to know where your Git binary is installed. Instructions: https://happygitwithr.com/rstudio-see-git

Find Git binary

  1. In RStudio, Tools > Terminal > New Terminal
  2. At the command line (in the new terminal), type which git if on a Mac and where git if in Windows.
  3. Copy that path. It probably doesn’t matter which one you use if there are multiple listed.

Tell RStudio the Git binary location

  1. In RStudio, Tools > Global Options > Git/SVN
  2. There is a box at top that asks for the location of the Git binary.
  3. Paste that path in.

Authenticating

GitHub Desktop

No tokens needed.

  1. Sign in under GitHub Desktop > Settings (or Options) > Account.
  2. Fill out your user info on GitHub Desktop > Settings (or Options) > Git.

Help! I signed up for GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Desktop will not authenticate!! Log out of GitHub Desktop under GitHub Desktop > Settings (or Options) > Account and log back in.

R users with RStudio

Install the usethis and credentials packages. Then run this code.

## set your user name and email:
usethis::use_git_config(user.name = "YourName", user.email = "your@mail.com")

## create a personal access token for authentication:
usethis::create_github_token()

Copy the token. It is really long. Copy that into YourPAT in code below.

## set personal access token:
credentials::set_github_pat("YourPAT")

Note for Linux users: credentials::set_github_pat() might store your PAT in a memory cache that expires after 15 minutes or when the computer is rebooted. You thus may wish to do extend the cache timeout to match the PAT validity period: usethis::use_git_config(helper="cache --timeout=2600000")

With a Personal Access Token

  1. Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens
  2. Click generate new token.
  3. For most uses, set the scope to “repo”. Definitely do not click all the scopes!
  4. Copy the token that it generates.

Open a terminal window and type

git config --global user.email "<your email>"
git config --global user.name "<your name>"
git config --global pull.rebase false

Next in the terminal window type one of these

  • Unix: git config --global credential.helper store
  • Max: git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain
  • Windows: git config –global credential.helper manager-core