About your personal account on GitHub
To get started with GitHub, you'll need to create a free personal account and verify your email address.
Every person who uses GitHub signs in to a user account. Your user account is your identity on GitHub and has a username and profile. For example, see @octocat's profile.
Later, you can explore the different types of accounts that GitHub offers, and decide if you need a billing plan. For more information, see Types of GitHub accounts and GitHub’s plans.
Note that the steps in this article don't apply to Enterprise Managed Users. If your GitHub account has been created for you by your company, you can skip this article and continue to Hello World.
Signing up for a new personal account
- Navigate to https://github.com/.
- Click Sign up.
- Follow the prompts to create your personal account.
During sign up, you'll be asked to verify your email address. Without a verified email address, you won't be able to complete some basic GitHub tasks, such as creating a repository.
Some enterprises create managed user accounts for their users. You can't sign up for a personal account with an email address that's already verified for a managed user account.
If you're having problems verifying your email address, there are some troubleshooting steps you can take. For more information, see Verifying your email address.
Next steps
- Now that you've created your personal account, we'll start to explore the basics of GitHub. In the next tutorial, Hello World, you'll learn about repositories and how to create one, and you'll be introduced to concepts such as branching, commits, and pull requests.
- We strongly recommend that you configure 2FA for your account. 2FA is an extra layer of security that can help keep your account secure. For more information, see Configuring two-factor authentication.