Copying a GitHub Repository to Your Local Computer

Key Takeaways

in this video we're going to copy a GitHub repository to your local computer the process I'll show you will work for a repo you created yourself or a repo you forked from someone else for this demo I'm going to use the test repo that we created in the last video Let's Open up get bash this shows my working directory I'm going to change my working directory Tory to the desktop now we're ready to go note that all git commands start with the word git and then the name of the command and then usually one or more arguments in this case we're going to use the git clone command to clone a GitHub repo you simply type git clone and then the URL of the repo how do you get that URL I recommend that you go to the repo scroll down here and click the copy button now go back to get bash and at least in Windows you can hit the insert button on your keyboard to paste it the usual paste keyboard shortcut doesn't seem to work in git bash if all else fails just paste the URL somewhere else and retype it if you're following along at home you should hit enter at this point I'm actually going to change my URL because I use SSH instead of https to communicate with GitHub I now hit enter and it asked me for my password when typing it won't show you anything hit enter when you're done and if you type the wrong password just try again the cloning operation is now complete it's copied the repo into a subdirectory of my working directory and that subdirectory has the same name as the repo so I can just CD into to test repo and LS to see the list of files notice that it now says master that indicates that I'm now in a folder that is being tracked by git and I'm currently working on the master Branch I don't need to run the git init command because git has already been initialized in the folder on Windows if you're setup to show hidden files you can also see this.get folder where all the git information is stored next let's check on your remotes remotes are simply references to repos that are not on your computer to see your remotes type git remote- V you'll see a remote called origin which links to your repo this reference was automatically created during the cloning process if you don't have an origin remote you can add one by typing get remote add origin and then the URL of your repo the same one from here we've now cloned the repo and set up remote in the next video we'll actually make some changes locally commit them and then push them up to GitHub