RStudio: Pushing to Github with ssh-authentication

If RStudio prompts you for a username and password every time you try to push your project to Github, open the shell (Git menu: More/Shel…) and do the following:

1) Set username and email (if you did not do that before)

git config --global user.name "your_username"
git config --global user.email "your_email@example.com"

2) Create SSH key

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com" 

To check that ssh-authentication works, try to run

ssh -T git@github.com

and you should get something like

Hi your_username! You’ve successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access. 

3) Change remote.origin.url from HTTPS to HTTP 

It might be Windows specific, but after 1)+2) RStudio still asks me for user name and password. After a long Google search, I have found a solution here and that is

git config remote.origin.url git@github.com:your_username/your_project.git

Hip, Hip, Hurrah!



If it was trivial for you, I do apologize. I am still very bad in guessing what could be useful for somebody and what not so much. That is why I have this blog and Github account in the first place.

One example, last year I published a paper in JSPI journal that improves a test for interaction in some very specific 2-way ANOVA situation (just one observation per group). The paper submission was an odyssey, mostly because of me. In one moment I doubted whether to retract the paper or not and I even did not upload the package to CRAN at first, just put it on Github.

Then I discovered that some guys found it and had built their package using it. They presented the results at UseR! 2013 conference. I might have met one of those biologists but I am sure I never mentioned my package to them. Finally, – and this is a bit embarrassing – I received an email from Fernando Tusell that I misspelled his name in one of my functions.

In summary, even if you see your work as non-essential from your perceptive, the others may have different view. Just do your best and share your results. Github is a perfect place for this.