Request an educational account at github

I requested last year for an educational account ... but it never got approved. For two courses this semester I was able to manage with gh-pages [shameless advert: http://tathagata.github.com/pwndeals and http://tathagata.github.com/finmotion ], but the database course, I really wish I was able to use git ... but too big for the free membership.

Also, for some assignments Professors wont like the idea that you make your code public - simply to prevent cheating and that they want to reuse assignments. Being able to have private repos really make sense in those situation.

Just curious, I can get 5 free private repositories under a micro plan as a student. What benefit does this have over bitbucket, which has unlimited private repositories? This is an honest question, I don't know that much about github.

This is just a general comment based on some of the (strange) sentiment below.

Github is a for-profit company. As a student, they're offering you a break to make it easier to use their service. They do this because they ultimately want you to pay them (or host great open source projects with them). If you're not a student and derive value from their service, pay them. It's $10s of dollars per month (for private repo hosting).

If you value your code, I'd encourage you to go with (and pay) a service whose primary business is hosting it for you. That's github. Your money is going to pay people (like you) who make a living writing code.

That's very nice.

But I have 54 private repos on my VPS. I think about something, start writing some code, and I need a repo.

Public GitHub repo would work too, but I don't want to have experiments all over my GitHub page.

So yeah, this is nice, but not for me...

Or just use BitBucket.

Alternatively you can get a completely free account at bitbucket. They started out with mercurial support, but they do git too, these days.

"Due to high demand, we've run out of student accounts. Don't worry, we'll have more soon. Please check back later."

So, you can add an email addy under your profile settings. But does this mean you can request an educational account if your main account is a private email addy?

I'm using this for 2 years and it is pretty good. Then I bought a Small ($12 plan), now I'm $7.00 off each month and paying $5 monthly. But it seems I'm approaching to the end of the 2 year period so I'll be moving some of my private projects to BitBucket. That's sad.

That is a great offering. It is an excellent idea to have students using standard "best practices" for their software projects, and will help teachers organize the review of these assignments.

Thank you github.

I have this and it's pretty awesome. I have to explain what git is to my professors every time I tell them I won't be using SVN though..

Assembla offers free private repos: http://www.assembla.com/plans

I got one last year, note that all the limits are soft limits. It's strange, but true.

Awesome! Wish I had this opportunity when I was in school.

Already "expired" due to high demand....

Micro plan ran out =(