Sure, then you have option 3: Put a "setup-git.sh" script in your repo, and have the README tell users to run that to set things up. If your users are willing t

Sure, then you have option 3: Put a "setup-git.sh" script in your repo, and have the README tell users to run that to set things up. If your users are willing to run code from your repo, you can just have them run code from your repo. In fact you can set the default branch to contain nothing but those two files, and have the setup script switch to the real branch once it's done with its work. (And if your users have some other way they expect to run code - make, setup.py, yarn run, whatever - you can use that instead as the entry point.)