Making a pull request
Contributing to open source is one of the best ways to hone up programming skills. Along with writing quality code, using a version control tool plays a crucial role while contributing. There are a lot of source control management platforms such as github , gitlab , phabricator etc. This blog discusses about making code contributions via github.
So what Is a Pull Request?
Pull request, as the name suggests is a patch of code that is sent to original code base to be merged into the source code after review. Usually, maintainers of the project will review the PR(pull request) and merge it into original code base if everything looks okay.
How to make a PR?
1. Fork the Repository and clone
First off, there should be a fork of the upstream repository. Fork is nothing but a copy of the upstream repository onto your own github. This is where you will be pushing your changes. (Since you own it :D)
Then, clone of repository so as to do the changes locally and testing them before sending a patch. This should be fairly simple using
git clone <repository URL>
2. Make a new branch
Now, if we want to make a change to the source code, we should always ensure that the master/development branch to be always in sync with upstream. You would definitely not like messing the master branch , and if in case the issue's priority is not high, the PR will be pending with the changes in master branch.
Other than that, the master branch is 'supposed' to have the updated code(or the production code), the rest of the features are supposed to be done on separate branches before being pushed into production.
Thus, it it is always a good practice to make new branches for each pull request to be opened. To do this use
git checkout -b <branch_name> -t upstream/master
This will make the branch in sync with the upstream. If upstream is not added, you can manually add it to remote using
git remote add upstream <upstream_URL>
Or alternatively, you can just create a branch and fetch from upstream using:
git checkout -b <branch_name>
git fetch upstream
3. Make changes in the created branch and push
make the required changes and commit them via git add and git commit commands
After the changes are done, push to your code via
git push origin <branch_name>
4. Make a pull request
Usually, just after pushing to github, you would button when you open your repository(on github) clicking on which a PR will be made. It should look something as follows:
If that doesn't show automatically, navigate to the branch(on github) and make a PR.
That is it! Now keeps doing the requested changes(if asked) locally and keep pushing code on the created branch till the point it is fit for merging.