Misc Github FAQs

Owned by Marc Miller, created
Last updated: Mar 08, 2024
2 min read

Here are some GitHub related FAQ for the College of Engineering. Many of these were previously their own separate mini articles

github.ucsb.edu run by the College of Engineering for Engineering Students was replaced in 2020 with a different version of Github run by Enterprise Technology Services (ETS/ITS) and open to all UCSB students.  Please see GitHub - ucsb/github-guide: GitHub Guide for UCSB - Start Here if you are new to Github for UCSB or for support https://www.it.ucsb.edu/help-support/it-services-catalog

As a disclaimer, we are maintaining pages about GitHub in our Knowledge Base solely so members of the College of Engineering can easily find information. We do not run the service anymore and if there is any disagreement between what is posted here and what is posted on github.ucsb.edu please take what is posted by ETS/ITS as the current correct answer, especially if it is something that can change based on policy decisions from ETS/ITS like max repo size, acceptable names for sub organizations, etc.. 

The SSH fingerprint for github.ucsb.edu at the time of the migration was:

    53:6d:7e:38:a2:5d:84:ee:64:23:4c:f0:a9:6b:da:c9 (RSA)

This key has been changed due to system software updates post migration.

As this service is no longer run by ECI, we will no longer be publishing the new fingerprint here.

Organizations are a way to simplify management of group-owned repositories and fine tune permissions.

For more info please see the following: Introducing Organizations

When creating an organization we ask that you append

Prefix: All organizations should begin with "ucsb-".

Identifier: The identifier should be a recognizable name that relates the repo to a department in the format "id-". For student organizations not related to a department stu- should be used.

Postfix: The postfix should be descriptive of the organization, such as the purpose or name of the team/lab.

and finally “-Org” to the end of the name.

example: ucsb-coe-example-org

This is so that organization names don’t conflict with anything else in our name space (like accounts).

Organization names will be checked and may be renamed if they don’t conform to this convention.

As github.ucsb.edu is now run by ITS/ETS they now have final say on what is considered an acceptable name. https://github.com/ucsb/github-guide/blob/main/Organization_Naming_Standard.md

For push, clone, or any other operation involving the github.ucsb.edu server you should be using either https or ssh as the protocol.

This will encrypt your credentials on the network and is generally safer.

You should not store any private or sensitive data, such as passwords or private keys, in any of your repos.

Additionally, media and binary files are not well suited to be used in GitHub.

GitHub is intended as a source code repository.

Please see http://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/index.html for the latest policies.

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