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From (mt) Community Wiki

Overview

This article will provide instructions on getting your server set up to work with GitHub in a usable state.

Requirements

For the purpose of this article you'll need the following,

• GitHub account
• Have SSH set up^[1] on your (gs) server

Instructions

Generating an SSH Key

First thing you should do is to make sure that you have an .ssh directory.

cd ~/.ssh

If you get an error "No such file or directory" you'll have to create it

mkdir ~/.ssh

Now you can run the following

ssh-keygen -t rsa

You should see the following output

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/123456/users/.home/.ssh/id_rsa):

/home/123456/users/.home/.ssh/

The default will suffice for our purposes so just hit enter. The next thing you'll need to do is create a secure passphrase which you will use to authenticate when running commands to GitHub. Once successfully ran you should see a similar output

The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
| .o  .o++o=o.    |
|...o..E.o+ +     |
| + .o  .+.=      |
|o .    ..+       |
| .      S .      |
|         .       |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
+-----------------+

Adding Your Key To GitHub

Head over to GitHub and under Account Settings, and to the SSH Public Keys section.

Back on your server you now need to get your key. When you generated your key it made two sets for you. A public key and a private key; the public key is what you'll give to GitHub.

tail /home/123456/users/.home/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Make sure that you copy it exactly as it was output. Back on GitHub click on the link to 'Add a new public key'. You can call this whatever you wish, then add your key and save.

Testing Out Your Key

Now that you have your key saved on GitHub lets test it out.

ssh -T git@github.com

You should get the following response

The authenticity of host 'github.com (207.97.227.239)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is (16:27:ac:a5:76:28:2d:65:3b:54:r4:58).
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Type in yes to this question and you'll receive the following

Hi username! You're successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Congratulations, you've set up your key properly!

From this point forward you should be able to run all the git commands you desire to GitHub assuming you have set up your repository^[2] correctly

Skip Manual Authentication

Now that you have your key and you're starting to run git commands it's starting to get annoying to have to type in your passphrase every time, isn't it? If you're on a windows machine you could use pageant, or on OSX the keyring but because this is our server we don't have access to those tools, however, Linux does have it's own variant. Lets add it!

First let's see if we have the appropriate program set up for us first.

ssh-add

If you get the following message then we'll have to set it up

"Could not open a connection to your authentication agent."

Let's set it up, we'll run the following

eval $(ssh-agent)

Everything's good to go and can run the ssh-add command again.

ssh-add /location/to/your/key

Once this is done SSH will use your key automatically and you no longer have to manually authenticate.

Resources

1. Connecting via SSH to your server
2. Creating a Repository on GitHub