🐙Git, GitHub & backups

You just laid down an agent that’s going to write code at full speed. Before it touches anything important, we install the safety net: Git, so every change is reversible, and GitHub, so your work lives somewhere other than this one little box. Because a mini-PC can fry, get stolen, or take one rm too many. Your code, though, must never disappear with it.

Why this is non-negotiable (especially with an agent)

A coding agent moves fast, and it’s confident in itself. Most of the time that’s great; sometimes it breaks something. Git turns that into a non-event:

• Every commit is a restore point. The agent broke everything? git restore or git reset, and you’re back to the previous state in a second. It’s the ultimate “undo.”
• You see exactly what changed. git diff shows you, line by line, what the agent touched. You review before approving, that’s the heart of the craft (see Securing access).
• GitHub puts your code out of reach of disasters. Dead disk, theft, fat-fingered mistake: your code is on GitHub, intact. You get it back on any machine with one command.
• And you can share. Granting access to a colleague, working as a team, going open source: it all goes through GitHub.

Configure Git on the machine

Three lines, once and for all. Git needs to know who you are (it signs your commits):

git config --global user.name "Your First Last"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
# A few sane defaults
git config --global init.defaultBranch main   # the default branch is called "main"
git config --global pull.rebase false          # predictable pull behavior

Give the machine access to GitHub

Your machine has to prove to GitHub that it’s allowed to push. Two paths; take the one that speaks to you.

# Install gh (official Ubuntu method)
sudo apt install -y gh
# Connect the machine to your account, answer the questions, it opens a browser
gh auth login

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "mini-pc-github"
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub   # copy what's displayed

ssh -T [email protected]   # should greet you by your GitHub username

Your first repo, and the agent that uses it

cd ~/my-project
git init
# The file that tells git what to IGNORE, crucial
cat > .gitignore <<'EOF'
node_modules/
.env
*.log
dist/
EOF
git add -A
git commit -m "First draft"
# Create the remote repo and push (with gh, it's one line)
gh repo create my-project --private --source=. --push

Once it’s in place, ask your agent to handle git for you: “regular commits with clear messages,” “create a branch for this feature,” “open a pull request.” You can even write it into your memory file: “commit after each approved step, conventional messages, only push to main with my OK.”

Backups: the 3-2-1 rule

GitHub saves your code. But your mini-PC contains plenty of other things that aren’t in git: your .env files, your databases, generated data, system configs. For those, we apply the golden rule of backup:

sudo apt install -y restic
# Initialize a backup repository (e.g., to a mounted NAS)
restic -r /mnt/nas/backups init
# First backup
restic -r /mnt/nas/backups backup ~/projects ~/configs