Question. If I want to have my Git account accessible by anyone (I'm an instructor and want to have my students access this account to get code & files stored there) do you still have to create an SSH key? Would that require anyone accessing the account to go through the SSH creation process first? Appreciate any info. Thanks.
@@christopherlyons7613 Great question! As long as your repositories are public, students will have read-only access to any code within the repository (even without an SSH key or a GitHub account). They can either clone the repo using HTTPS, the GitHub CLI, or by downloading the repo as a zip file. The SSH key becomes important when you are creating your own repositories, or you are a contributor to another repository and GitHub needs to know who you are. Hope that helps!
@@thecommoncoderGreat thank you. So if I create a PUBLIC repository then anyone can download (CLONE) the repository regardless of SSH key status, correct? Now what happens if I create a PRIVATE repository? Which I'm leaning to since I'd rather restrict access just to my students (but I wouldn't want to have them create SSH keys and require me to add/delete all that for every class). This is where a userid/password seems to make more sense for my use case. Is there any way to configure it to work the way I want?
@christopherlyons7613 For a private repo, you'll have to grant each student access to the repo. Students would need to setup an SSH key for read-only access in that case, but that doesn't require anything to be done on your end. However, you will have to manually add the list of students to the repository though, which can be tedious depending on the number of students. For some additional context, SSH keys are computer/account specific. This means that each student would manage their own SSH key(s) for their GitHub Account. It essentially sets up the authentication between their computer and their GitHub account so you don't have to put in a username/password each time something on your computer interacts with GitHub (command line, VS Code, GitHub Desktop, etc).
@@thecommoncoder K. Is there any way to setup a PUBLIC repo that you can restrict who can gain access? Guess that doesn't really make sense but I think what I need to do will be easiest to handle with a PUBLIC repo but I'd like to limit that to just class students. I don't want to take them through SSH setup nor really require them to have a Git account to access the files. I could also just do this through a shared cloud drive. But I wanted to at least introduce them to Git & GitHub and thought this would be a way to do that.
@christopherlyons7613 Not that I'm aware of. I feel like you run the same risk either way with a public repo or a shared cloud drive link. That link could theoretically be shared with anyone just the same as a link to the repository. It think the best option in this case would be a public repo if you don't want to manage access.
