# Getting Started with Seqera

{% hint style="info" %}
Please read all of the instructions on the page to see what information you need to gather before sending an email to the team at <amon-help@mit.edu>.
{% endhint %}

## Create an Engaging account

If you do not have an Engaging account, you can create one at the following link:

{% embed url="<https://orcd-docs.mit.edu/orcd-systems/#how-to-get-an-account-on-engaging>" %}

Once you have an Engaging account, you'll need to notify the team at <amon-help@mit.edu> so that they can put you into the correct group to access the Seqera resources.

## Create a Seqera account

Navigate to the [Seqera website](https://seqera.io/) and sign up for an account. Please use your MIT email when signing up so that we can be sure that the Seqera account corresponds to you. After signing up, notify the team at <amon-help@mit.edu> so that they can place you into the correct workspace on the Seqera Platform Cloud.

## Associate your Engaging and Seqera accounts

For Seqera to submit Nextflow pipelines on Engaging on your behalf, you'll need to create an SSH key for Seqera to use to login as your user. Once you have the SSH key, it will need to be tied to your Seqera account.

To create the SSH key, run the following commands on Engaging:

```bash
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/id_seqera
# Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
# Enter passphrase for "/home/<you>/.ssh/id_seqera" (empty for no passphrase): <hit enter>
# Enter same passphrase again: <hit enter>
# Your identification has been saved in /home/<you>/.ssh/id_seqera
# Your public key has been saved in /home/<you>/.ssh/id_seqera.pub
# The key fingerprint is:
# SHA256:<hash> <you>@<hostname>
# The key's randomart image is:
# <artwork>

```

This will create two files: `home/<you>/.ssh/id_seqera.pub`  and `home/<you>/.ssh/id_seqera`. The file without the `.pub` suffix is your SSH private key, which proves that you are you. The file with the `.pub` suffix is the SSH public key, which is used to authenticate whoever holds the corresponding private key.

Place the contents of the public key into your `authorized_keys` file to signify that whoever presents the corresponding private key can login as you.

```bash
cat ~/.ssh/id_seqera.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
```

Then, copy the contents of the private key and send it to the team at <amon-help@mit.edu> so that they can add that private key to your Seqera account user.

{% hint style="danger" %}
Do not share your SSH private key with anyone, as they can use it to login to your Engaging account. For the purpose of signing up to use Seqera, only share the SSH private key that you generated specifically for this purpose, and not any that may already exist in your `~/.ssh` directory.
{% endhint %}