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1.4 A remote: your journal, off your laptop

Right now every snapshot of your vault lives in one place: the laptop that could be stolen, dropped, or die of an SSD failure the week before an interview where you wanted to show off this exact journal. A remote fixes that. It's a copy of your repository on someone else's server that you push commits to and pull commits from.

We'll use GitHub, because it's free for private repositories and because a GitHub account is de facto professional infrastructure in this industry anyway. (GitLab and others work identically; the course standardizes on GitHub so the screenshots match.) Later, in Module 6, you'll build your own Git server inside the lab and point the vault at it instead. Cloud first, self-hosted once you can host.

Account and tooling​

Create an account at github.com if you don't have one. Enable two-factor authentication while you're there; a security course that skips 2FA on day one would be embarrassing.

Then install GitHub's command line tool, which makes authentication painless:

# Windows
winget install --id GitHub.cli -e
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install gh

# macOS (with Homebrew)
brew install gh

Reopen your terminal and log in:

# Starts a browser-based login. Pick "GitHub.com", then "HTTPS",
# then "Login with a web browser" and follow the code it shows.
gh auth login

Create the remote and push​

cd ~/git/lab-journal

# Create a PRIVATE repository on GitHub named lab-journal, wire
# it up as this folder's remote, and push everything in one go.
gh repo create lab-journal --private --source=. --push

Private matters here. Your journal will eventually contain the guts of your lab, and "what broke" sections are exactly what you don't publish.

Check your work:

# Which remote is this folder connected to?
git remote -v

# Open the repository in your browser and see your notes online.
gh repo view --web

From now on the daily rhythm from lesson 1.3 gains one beat: status, add, commit, push. Commit is the snapshot; push is the snapshot leaving the building.

The habit that proves it works​

Edit a note, commit, push. Then open the repo in your browser and find your change. Do that round trip once a day for the rest of this module until it's boring. Boring is the goal; backup systems you have to think about are backup systems you'll eventually skip.