Github Account Preparation

Full-time students at NC State with active Unity accounts are given a free GitHub account to store files and host a website, if they so desire. In order to take advantage of this offering, you must manually configure your account.

Understanding how your account should be set up is important.  You should follow all the steps listed below to set up your account and have it prepared to host your website.

Manual Setup

  1. Navigate to github.ncsu.edu
  2. Login/sign up using your Unity credentials
  3. Click the green “New Repository” button
    • Name the repository “webpages” and give it a short description
    • Make sure it is marked as “Public”
    • Select the option for “Initialize this repository with a readme”
  4. Click “Create Repository”
  5. Click the “Settings” tab
    • Scroll down to “Github Pages”
    • Change source from “None” to “main” and hit save
    • Scroll back down to “Github Pages”, you should now see the URL your website will be visible at (when you add html files)
  6. Click the “Code” tab
  7. For any file you want to add to your webpage, click “Upload file” and choose the file to upload, saving will make the page immediately visible.
    • You must have a file called “index.html” on your webpage, even if it is blank, or the webpages will display the readme instead of your webpage

Once these steps have been completed, your webpage will be viewable at the following URL:

https://pages.github.ncsu.edu/unityID/webpages/filename.html
  • Where unityID is replaced with your unityID
  • Where webpages is the name of the repository
    • If you make more repositories, this would change
  • Where filename.html is the name of your HTML file
  • Please note all items are case sensitive.

What happens to my GitHub @ NCSU data/account when I graduate?

Soon after graduation from NC State, your unity account will no longer be able to log into NC State GitHub. If you are a student collaborating with a faculty member that will need access to your repositories after you graduate, it is important to make arrangements so that the faculty member has access before you leave.  The suggested approach for transferring GitHub repo ownership (CSC-related) to a faculty is create a GitHub organization of the form ENGR-CSC-XXXXXX (where XXXXXX is something representative/meaningful of your GitHub repos) and make the faculty the organization owner. Since repositories are owned by the organization rather than a user account, the repository and all access controls are retained even when people leave the university. We recommend using an organization for any repository that impacts more than a single person.  

For all other personal repositories, it is strongly recommended you archive those before your access to NC State GitHub is disabled. For more information about GiHub best practices, policies, and FAQs please visit: