Customize Your GitHub Copilot Experience

Customize GitHub Copilot's behavior with custom instructions, prompts, and chat modes for your specific development workflows.

Welcome

• Who is this for: Developers and educators who want to tailor Copilot's behavior to their specific workflows
• What you'll learn: How to set up custom instructions, prompts, and chat modes to make Copilot more effective for your specific use cases
• What you'll build: A customized Copilot setup with instructions, prompts, and chat modes that automatically generate consistent pieces of code following your project standards
• Prerequisites: Getting Started with GitHub Copilot exercise
• How long: This exercise takes less than 30 minutes to complete.

In this exercise, you will:

1. Set up repository-wide custom instructions to provide Copilot the essential project context
2. Create targeted custom instructions for specific file types and directories
3. Build reusable prompt templates for common tasks like homework assignments
4. Configure custom chat modes for specialized workflows

How to start this exercise

Simply copy the exercise to your account, then give your favorite Octocat (Mona) about 20 seconds to prepare the first lesson, then refresh the page.

Having trouble? 🤷

When copying the exercise, we recommend the following settings:

• For owner, choose your personal account or an organization to host the repository.

• We recommend creating a public repository, since private repositories will use Actions minutes.

If the exercise isn't ready in 20 seconds, please check the Actions tab.

• Check to see if a job is running. Sometimes it simply takes a bit longer.

• If the page shows a failed job, please submit an issue. Nice, you found a bug! 🐛

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