To generate a PAT in GitHub, the email you're using for GitHub needs to be verified.
If you are reviewing this lesson before starting at Epicodus, you should follow the steps below to learn how to use a PAT, but you won't be expected to actually use it until your first day of Epicodus when you do the following lesson: Practice: GitHub Remote Repositories. You will be using PATs every day while you are a student at Epicodus, so it's really important that you know how to do it. Let's go through the steps to generate and use a PAT.
With a password, we might update it from time to time (hopefully), but we don't delete and replace it. This is different from how we generally use a password. Another key difference is that it's easy to delete and create new PATs in GitHub if you need to. The difference is that GitHub will generate it for you. To access repositories in GitHub via the command line, we need to use a personal access token, which is also called a PAT for short. For example, when you log in to your email with a username and password, your email provider will authenticate your credentials before giving you access. We use authentication all the time when we are working on computers. However, in order to push and pull code, GitHub needs to verify that we should have access to the repositories. When we make changes to code on our local machines, we can push the updated code to a repository. When we need to grab code from a repository, we can pull it to our local machines using the command line. That means in your future career, you'll likely be focused on just a handful of repositories that are used regularly. Enterprise companies generally have repositories that are used for long-term projects. Generally, we will be working with new repositories every class session, but sometimes we'll use the same repository for longer projects. A repository is just a place where a codebase is stored.
While you are a student at Epicodus, you will be using the terminal to push and pull code from GitHub repositories.