GitHub Settings

Setting up your account in GitHub was a fairly easy process. GitHub feeds pulls up your interests and shows you the content in which you might be interested. Therefore if you have a new account, you might be seeing some repositories under discover repository section on your dashboard.

Since GitHub connects people who have similar interests on projects, it is better if a user has a good profile along with a good reputation. GitHub also contains GitHub Settings sections for the user to use GitHub according to his preferences.  These settings can be helpful on your journey to GitHub. Summarising these points into bullets, in this tutorial, we will throw some light on:

• Editing Your Profile on GitHub.
• Changing Your Settings on GitHub.

 

GitHub Profile

The GitHub profile of a user is his face. Since people do not actually meet or chat on GitHub, knowing something about your teammate is a good thing. Your GitHub profile helps people know a little bit about you and your background. People find you a little bit familiar if your profile is properly filled. The chances of them following you and watch you will increase with a good profile.

Along with the section about the information about you, your profile contains information about your activities and contributions to GitHub. So, if someone visits your profile he can see how much work you have done on GitHub. This helps recruiters too in filtering out your profile. Let’s try to edit our profile to make it more appealing.

To start with, select the icon you see in the top-right corner in the header section.

 

Select Your Profile in the dropdown.

 

The next screen you see will be the information on which most people will be interested in. Though it is currently empty, it will fill up as we progress through the course. The middle part of the screen is divided into three main sections as you can see in the below image.

 

1. Profile Header: The first part will give your stats such as how many repositories you have, how many followers you have or how many people you follow etc. Since it is a new account, everything is zero.
2. Repositories: The second part will list the popular repositories among the public repositories you are following or to which you are contributing. Since it is a new account, there is no available public repository.
3. Contributions: The third part is your contribution graph. This graph shows your contributions over time through the colours mentioned in the bottom right corner. As we will make more and more contributions, those will be reflected in the graph. If you want to see through colours how your graph will look after some progress, you can see the image below.

Yes, I know its Awesome.

 

The left section of the profile page shows your profile picture, your GitHub joining date and an option to edit the profile.

 

Go to Edit profile or Click on the Profile Picture to open the Edit Profile page.

 

Your profile contains a few important fields which are explained in the image below the text field. Please note that the URL is the URL of your website and the location is your current location. Fill up the profile and upload a nice profile picture to get started with GitHub.

Once you are done with all the filling and uploading, we will move on to GitHub settings.

 

 

GitHub Settings

GitHub settings allow you to manage some technical and important fields regarding your GitHub account. It also allows you to set preferences for your account on different elements. It should be noted that the profile section of GitHub is a part of GitHub settings only. The left column visible while we were editing the profile was the settings column as shown in the image below.

Let’s see each setting tab one by one.

 

 

Account Settings in GitHub

The account setting lets you manage properties of your account like changing the username, deleting account etc.

 

• Change Username: Will change your unique username. Although it is not recommended since your username is your identity among the GitHub community.
• Export Account Data: This option will export all your account data to your system. Once the export is ready, you will receive an email through which you can download all the data. This data will include your profile data, plan, issues, pull requests, comments, releases, events, attachments, milestone, etc in Git and JSON format only.
• Mobile Settings: This setting will make every page available in the desktop view only, irrespective of the platform on which you are viewing (except responsive pages).
• Delete Account: This will delete your account permanently.

 

 

Security Settings in GitHub

Navigate to the next option of security settings. It will again contain multiple options.

• Change Password: Used for changing the password of your GitHub account.
• Two-Factor Authentication: This option will add an extra layer of security to your login process. Once this is enabled, you would be required to enter a code along with the username and password while logging in. This code will be sent to you via application or SMS as you choose.

• Sessions: This will contain the list of devices from which your account was accessed. You can always note any suspicious activity and perform actions against it.
• Security History: This option will show you the important activities on your account that are directly or indirectly related to the security of your account. For example, logging in or failed login, etc.

 

 

Emails Settings in GitHub

Email setting in GitHub will contain the setting corresponding to the emails related to your account and notifications received via emails.

• Add email address: This option will add another trusted email address to your account which will be considered as a secondary email address. You can use this to recover your account and increase the security of your account.
• Email Preferences: This option lets you choose what kind of email notifications you would like to receive from GitHub. The description in the image is quite clear.

 

 

Notifications Setting in GitHub

This setting lets you configure how and when you want to receive the notifications.

• Automatic Watching: Receive notifications for a change in the repository on which you are working or when there is any discussion of your team.
• Participating: Receive notifications for the conversations you are a part of or when someone mentions you through @name.
• Watching: Receive notifications for all the conversations, teams or repositories you are watching.
• Security Alert: Get alert whenever there is a potential threat or security vulnerability on your account.
• Email Notification Preferences: Choose the default notification email and the preference of when you want to receive the email notifications as seen in the image.

 

 

Billing Setting on GitHub

This setting is about paying your bills and upgrading your plans on GitHub. Since we are on a free plan, there is no need for this setting unless you are thinking of updating it.

Most of these settings are not required in the beginning. If required, they will be discussed there only.

 

 

SSH and GPG Key Settings on GitHub

SSH keys are required in order to identify that it is you who is accessing the account without entering the username and password. Through public-private key pair inside SSH keys, you can access your account securely.

A GPG Key is the key that can be used to sign your commits on GitHub. Through cryptographic methods, GitHub is able to verify the commits being done. Both of these concepts are currently out of the scope of this course. We will discuss them if required.

You can generate these keys from this setting only.

 

 

Block User Setting in GitHub

As the name suggests, this setting is used to block the user from your profile. As a result, the blocked user will not be able to comment, pull request, invite you, fork, watch, add & edit pages, follow your activity and mention you anywhere, etc.

You can simply type the email address, name or username of the user you want to block.

The list of blocked users by you will appear in the box as seen in the image.

 

 

Repositories Setting in GitHub

The repository tab of settings allows you to manage your repositories and the activities performed on them. It allows you to do the following things:

• Set the visibility of the repository.
• Customize how changed files should appear on GitHub.
• Your repository’s social media preview.
• Renaming your repository.
• Transferring your repository to other users or organizations.
• Deleting your repository.

Since we do not have any repository, this section will be empty for us.

 

 

Organizations Settings on GitHub

The organizations’ settings list all the organizations that we are a part of and let us do the following actions on them:

• Verifying organization’s domain.
• Renaming an organization.
• Transferring the ownership of the organization.
• Restricting repository creation in your organization.
• Setting the permissions for organization members to delete or transfer the repositories.
• Change the visibility of the repository in your organization.
• Let people fork on the repositories in your organization.
• Giving access to members to delete the issues in your organization.
• Displaying the member names of your organization.
• Deleting the organization account.

and a few more.

Since we are not a part of any organization, this setting will be currently empty for us.

 

 

Saved Reply Setting on GitHub

The saved reply setting let you save a reply which can be used anywhere on GitHub. The main intention of this setting is to have saved sentence(s) which are used by the user many times. This will save his time and the effort to write the same sentence again and again. You can go ahead and save your own reply.

 

 

Applications Settings on GitHub

The application setting let you manage the third-party and GitHub applications to which you have allowed access anytime in the past. The user can manage those applications and restrict the access of those applications to your GitHub account. These applications include the GitHub applications, Authorized GitHub applications (that you authorized to access your account) and OAuth applications (that you authorized to sign in on other websites and access your details).

Since currently there are no applications installed, this setting will be empty.

 

A long list of settings has finished and I hope you have understood the meaning and importance of them. They might not be required now but as you progress and go deep into GitHub, you will surely tweak the settings one day. It is better if you go through them now so that you know that a setting exists for what you need to do. It will help you save time in the future.