Making a Pull Request on a GitHub Repo

Guide for contributing to another code base by making a pull request

Public Repo

1. Identify a project you want to contribute to on GitHub
2. Fork that project
3. Clone it to your local machine*

note : Do not clone in another directory that was already cloned from another repo. For example, when I cloned pytalentsolution on my local machine, I initially cloned it inside Saku directory, which was itself a clone of an already-existing-repo. The correct way was to create a new directory for pytalentsolution.

4. Make a new branch

• 4a: cd into directory of the cloned repo
• 4b: use git branch to confirm you’re on the *master branch
• 4c: use git checkout -b name_of_new_branch
• 4d: use git branch to check that you’re on name_of_new_branch

5. Make changes

6. Push it back to your repo

note : You’ll get a message git push remote -- use this instead of the traditional git push

7. (Go back to the forked repo in GitHub) Click the Compare & Pull Request button.

• add a description to changes made in the pull request

8. Click Create pull request to open a new pull request

Private Repo

1-3. You cannot fork a private repo

4. Clone directly to local machine

5. git branch -a to see all branches in the project

6. git branch to confirm you’re on master branch

7. [important] git status to check if ahead or behind (if behind, use git pull to fetch and download content from a remote repository)

8. [from git master] create a new branch use git checkout -b name_of_new_branch

9. Use git branch to make sure you’re on new branch

10. Make changes, then normal: git add, git commit -m “message”, git push

note : You’ll get a message git push remote -- use this instead of the traditional git push

10. (Go back to the forked repo in GitHub) Click the Compare & Pull Request button.

• Add good PR description, see here

11. Click Create pull request to open a new pull request

Production vs Development

Ongoing projects with several contributors will generally separate the main from develop branch. Making a PR in this context is slighty different:

1. In the command line, switch to development branch git checkout develop (even if you don’t see the develop branch locally, you may just see main or a new branch you created new_branch).

2. Now that you’re starting on develop branch, do git pull origin develop to make sure that any prior changes from the develop branch is pulled in locally, and you’re up-to-date.

3. Then from develop, create a new feature branch like so: git checkout feature/new-branch. (note: feature/new-branch is a naming convention that explicitly says you’re creating a new feature branch).

4. Then make your changes or add new code.

5. Then, git push origin (in this case, origin will be develop)

6. Once you go back to github, if you see compare and pull request, make sure it is being merged into develop and not main.

When Feature branch goes out of sync with Development

Sometimes you’ve already pushed a pull request, but the development branch goes ahead of your proposed changes. Here’s how to handle:

1. Switch to a specific feature branch (no need to go back to develop): git checkout branch_name
2. Run git pull origin develop
3. Then git push origin

3a. If there’s an Index Error, run

• git reset --hard *
• git clean -df

• git reset is to take the current branch and reset it to point somewhere else, also bringing the index and working tree along. Here’s a more visual explanation ( source)

If your main branch is C and you want to point your current branch somewhere else:

- A - B - C (HEAD, main branch)

and you want to point to B, not C, then you use git reset B to move it there:

- A - B (HEAD, main branch)  # - C is still here, but there's no branch pointing to it anymore

VIM

If for whatever reason you find yourself on VIM, you can escape by:

1. Press esc (escape)
2. Press : (colon)
3. Press wq (write and quit)

Or one-line command to get out of VIM

4. Press :wq! (colon, write and quit)