CianMRoche / Free-copilot

Get copilot (and more) for free as a student or educator

Get github copilot subscription for free (and more)

This will get you access to github education (+github copilot) using your enrolment at a university. For educators youll have to upload a different document in step 3 and make sure you select "for educators" when prompted, but the process is generally the same. Shown below is the steps I followed using MIT enrolment documentation as a student.

Steps

1. Need a github account with your .edu account attached to it (go to https://github.com/settings/emails if you need to add one to an existing account)
2. Go to https://education.github.com/benefits and click "get student benefits" on the left
3. Need to upload proof of registration since our IDs have no dates. Go to https://registrar.mit.edu/transcripts-records/transcripts-certifications-letters/enrollment-certifications to get a pdf
4. The upload process is currently quite odd; need to take a picture while on the webpage (people are complaining online, no solution coming yet). I cant do that reliably so I did the following to get a virtual camera:
   • Download OBS here https://obsproject.com/
   • Install saying to optimize for whatever youd like, I chose optimize for recording but doesnt matter
   • Open the pdf obtained above in a pdf viewer/browser
   • Add a source with the plus button in the "sources" section near the bottom left of OBS
   • Crop source according to https://www.alphr.com/obs-crop-window so it only shows the important bits
   • Drag the little red box to fill the scene canvas, mine looked like this, but you could also just set the scene size to be smaller

     

   • Click "start virtual camera" on the right
   • Tell github to use your virtual camera (may need to restart browser for it to show up)

     

   • My picture looks weird and long after i click take picture, yours might too, i just submitted and moved on.
5. It got approved for me within 24 hours, benefits are added to your account within 72 hours. You should get an email to your MIT email with Github education in the title, but can also check by going to your profile on github and you should see a little tag that says "PRO" under your name on the left somewhere like picture below)

   

6. Once you have the education benefits, go to github's settings, copilot on the left, and signing up should be free. Click "buy" and youll go to a screen like this.

7. You've got it now, have fun. My recommendation is to use [visual studio code](https://code.visualstudio.com/) as your editor, and to use the github copilot extension (which will require you to sign in to your github account through vscode to unlock copilot usage). Better still is to use the github copilot chat extension too, which allows for an in-IDE amazing chat bot to help with code generation, debugging and testing. This may require using the github copilot nightly extension rather than the basic github copilot extension, and signing up for a waitlist (which only took a few minutes to go through for me).