Subsection 2.1.1 What is GitHub?
GitHub is a freely-available service for authoring, sharing, and deploying documents and source code, owned by Microsoft. It uses the free and open-source Git software for version management.
There are other services such as CoCalc 1 (see Section 5.14) and GitLab 2 for managing PreTeXt documents online, as well as other ways to write PreTeXt that don’t require anything besides installing the free and open-source PreTeXt software onto your own device (see Section 2.4 to learn more).
We will use GitHub for this tutorial as it the most popular way to share and disseminate PreTeXt documents, and provides the easiest pathway to getting started writing in the PreTeXt language.
To create your free GitHub account, follow the instructions on GitHub’s signup page 3 . You can also log into an existing GitHub account if you already have one. Be sure to note your GitHub username and password in your password manager (or however you usually keep track of login credentials).
Tip!
Educators and non-profit researchers can get many of GitHub’s paid features for free. While this is not strictly required for the rest of the tutorial, it’s a useful way to increase GitHub’s free Codespaces usage quotas.
Apply at Education.GitHub.com 4 to unlock these features. In our experience, applications are usually processed quickly for
.edu email addresses, but you do not need to wait for approval to continue on with this tutorial.cocalc.comabout.gitlab.com/github.com/signupeducation.github.com/discount_requests/pack_application
