Setting Up Your Computer With GitHub Via Access Tokens

If you are like me, you were probably still using the old way of having your computer set up with GitHub via a password. Much to our dismay (for what I’d assume are valid reasons that I haven’t looked into yet), as of August 13th (yes, a Friday), we were unable to push our code because we were behind with the times. I would like to share with you the SUPER QUICK way I got my code back up and pushing (because everywhere I looked online was overly complicated or didn’t give enough information).

Create an access token

#1 — Verify your email address, if it hasn’t been verified yet.

#2 — In the upper-right corner of any page, click your profile photo, then click Settings.

#3 — In the left sidebar, click Developer settings.

#4 — In the left sidebar, click Personal access tokens.

#5 — Click Generate new token.

#6 — Give your token a descriptive name.

#7 — To give your token an expiration, select the Expiration drop-down menu, then click a default or use the calendar picker.

#8 — Select the scopes, or permissions, you’d like to grant this token. To use your token to access repositories from the command line, select repo.

#9 — Click Generate token.

#10 — Store the token somewhere safe. I personally use a password keeper (LastPass), but you can use any secure method. Feel free to write it down and shove it under your mattress if nothing else.

Put your code to use

Update remote URL git remote set-url origin https://<token>@github.com/<git_url>

Pull once: git pull https://<token>@<git_url>.git

(Pushing code into a repository will also work like above, just use push instead of pull)

Hopefully this helps at least one person! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!