On Github, most of the open source projects already have many existing commits. If I want to make my contribution to such a project, since I don't know which step the current project is, and I don't know what's needed to be done next, how should I start my contribution? Anyone who ever made some contributions, how did you start, I will really appreciate it if you can share some of you experiences.
On GitHub specifically, you
fork a repo you want to contribute to (that allows you to have your own copy on GitHub)
you clone that forked repo locally
you make a dedicated branch for your new commits (your contribution)
you push it back to your fork (after rebasing it on top of the latest commits from upstream, to make sure your work is applied on top of the most recent evolutions from the original repo)
you make a PR (pull request) from that branch.
Related
I'd like to know how to proceed in GitHub where I could to be able to get the updates from the original repo but prevent opening a PR after each time I push a change made by myself?
The concept I want to apply this is to use a blog template for my GitHub pages. I'd like to get the feature for the future if the contributors would make any but at the same time, I'd like to prevent pushing anything to the original repo as a PR since those commits wouldn't include anything related to making a contribution to the project.
PRs aren't generated automatically, you need to explicitly create them from a branch.
You can fork a repo and work on it, and when needed, fetch and rebase from the original repo you forked from. As long as you don't explicitly use this repo to create PRs on the original repo, you should be fine.
EDIT - Adding some details as per the last comment:
Assume there's a repo called something owned by someone. You can start off by forking it to youruser using the GitHub UI. Then you can clone your fork and work on it:
git clone https://github.com/youruser/something.git
In order to get the recent changes from the original someone/something repo, you need to set it up as a remote. By convention you'd call this remote your "upstream", but you can really give it any name you choose:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/someone/something.git
Once you've added it as a remote, you can fetch from it and rebase on top of it:
git fetch upstream && git rebase upstream/main
(note that using the main branch is just an example. You can of course rebase on top of any branch in the remote repo)
I think it's not possible because when you clone or fork that repo, from that time, you start to add your own content to it since it's your personal blog. So you cannot keep getting the features from main repo. Maybe you can try rebase but I'm not sure if it works for this case. Or you can add those features to your repo by your own whenever you need them.
For a project with multiple developers where one developer controls what goes to production: This developer pushes from his own branch <his_branch>, and everyone has to incorporate their changes into his branch. His branch contains his changes and the changes other developers' changes. How do I make sure I pull down his most recent branch and work from it on my local. I have tried so many different commands and approaches, with the most recent being:
Git clone the repository (done when I started the project)
Fetch his branch
Create a working branch <my_branch> from <his_branch>
git checkout -b my_branch origin/his_branch
(I get errors)
Create my branch on remote
Fetch all including my new branch (but my new branch contains code from Master)
Access my branch locally, work on it, commit changes, create a pull request for him to review
(I don't have his latest code) and there are many conflicts to resolve
I am new to GitHub and can't find a fairly straightforward answer to this question. Typically people who answer this question, make sure they provide the most complicated solution to follow to try to impress with their GitHub acumen.
Can someone provide a straightforward answer without snark, condescension, or derision?
I have a set of documentation for my company's API, based on the excellent Slate framework from TripIt. Per instructions, I forked their repo and proceeded to customize it. That fork lives here.
The obnoxious thing is that when contributors in my organization do a new pull request, the "base fork" on the Github "Comparing Changes" screen defaults to TripIt's repository, not my fork. They've more than once sent pull requests to the wrong place. Telling people "don't do that" isn't a particularly reliable solution. How can I set the default for where PRs are based to my fork?
GitHub keeps track of forks made through their interface and assumes pull requests will be for that original repository. You need to tell GitHub that your copy is not a fork but rather a regular repository that just happens to have identical history. Sadly, GitHub doesn't offer a good way to just uncheck the fork link. I typically solve it this way:
Clone the repository, git pull, and ensure your local copy is completely up to date.
Delete the repository on GitHub.
Create the repository on GitHub using the exact same name. Ensure it's an empty repository (don't create a README or LICENSE file.)
git push all the content back into the repository. (You may need to switch to each branch and push it, and you also may need to git push --tags.)
FRAGILE: This approach will lose existing GitHub issues and pull request comments. If you're using these heavily, this approach is probably a bad idea, and you should contact GitHub customer support to help you instead.
It is unfortunate that GitHub does not provide a way to configure the default PR target repo.
If you can delete (or get the owner to delete) the original repo A from which B was forked, then that will do the trick.
If it is not possible/agreeable to delete A, but the owner of A is willing to do the following, then the fork link gets broken, on GitHub Enterprise at least:
mark repo A as Private
mark repo A as Public again
After doing this, repo B (which was originally forked from A) will default to opening PRs against itself, rather than A.
Note: if A itself was forked from something further back in the history, then unfortunately it seems that B starts defaulting to opening PRs against that repo once A has gone. The only solution would be to apply the above to all repos upstream in the fork tree :(
Your other developers seem to have forked TripIt's repository, so that is the source/parent of their work.
In fact, if you open your own repository, you will see it hasn't been forked at all (the fork count is 0).
When they issue a merge request, by default github shows that repository as source, and so the pull request isn't sent to you.
The simplest workaround in this case is to ask your dev's to fork your repository, and work on it.
Yes, it's a bad situation...
The only solution I know of (other than deleting the fork and recreating/pushing directly from a local clone as described here ) is to have the upstream owner make the original repo PRIVATE and then return it to PUBLIC. Taking it private breaks the link to forks permanently.
But of course that requires action by the upstream owner. Github should really solve this, but it's been an issue for a very long time.
I am new to GitHub. I don't know the correct process to merge my changes with the upstream. I followed following steps using EGit (I like to use it because I find it simple). Please help me.
On GitHub I created a fork.
For my fork I cloned a repository in Eclipse and imported respective projects.
In remotes, I added one more for the main project say Upstream(from where I forked) on GitHub.
I added some changes into my local repository.
How can I do the following part? -
Now in the meantime other people added some changes to the upstream. Now I want to integrate my changes(in the fork I created) to the latest changes(upstream) using EGit and push it to my repository and send a pull request.
Please help me.
create another remote corresponding to your fork in Eclipse
publish (push) your changes into your fork repo on github
create a merge request from the web interface in the original github repo, pointing to your changes on github
There is the procedure, how I do it.
GitHub browser UI
delete your fork with too much mess, if exists - this is in your Settings -> Danger Zone, the button is in upper menu bar in the root of fork
fork for you a new one on the foreign page, where I have access
open newly created fork and copy URI to the clipboard
Git perspective in Eclipse
create clone of your fork in my GUI Eclipse
Create a new branch in local branches and activate it
Import project from working tree in Eclipse as general project from Git perspective to actual workspace
do changes, integrate your important files to the general project (add to index etc.)
commit, push
GitHub browser UI
create Pull request from your fork directly from actual branch (recommended) or after merge in master branch
Notice, that in the picture is merge branch selected. In our real case is better to use the name, which is more descriptive.
If I fork a project that's hosted on github. Do I fork all the branches? How do I know which branch my fork is based on? In other words which branch will be downloaded to my PC?
Think of it this way:
The repo[sitory] corresponds to the collaborated work of the team across one or many branches. All contributors have their own copy of it.
Each fork of the main repo corresponds to a contributor's work. A fork is really a Github (not Git) construct to store a clone of the repo in your user account. As a clone, it will contain all the branches in the main repo at the time you made the fork.
Each branch within the fork and/or in the main repo can correspond to several kinds of things, depending on how you want to work. Each branch could refer to a version of the project but can also correspond to different channels of development, like hotfixes or experimental work.
The pull request (in the GitHub ecosystem) corresponds to the task. Every time I want to contribute an isolated finished task to the main repo, I create a pull request corresponding to the commits made in that task. These commits are pulled from either my fork or my branch to the main repo.
A commit is a set of changes to the code. This is one of the most interesting things about Git. You don't transfer files, you transfer logs of changes.
All branches on GitHub will be copied in a fork. (Obviously, this doesn’t include branches that were never pushed to GitHub in the first place.)
But a fork is a GitHub-to-GitHub operation; nothing is copied to your PC. It’s not quite the same as a Git clone. If you mean to ask “what’s copied when I clone a project?”, see the manual for git-clone(1).
Fork is a clone on the GitHub side (it clones everything).
When you are cloning a repo, you are getting the all history of said repo, with all its branches.
Even though you can in theory change the default branch of a remote repo, a clone from a GitHub repo mainly look for the master branch. Meaning to change the "default" branch a GitHub clone will get, you need to rename the master branch.
If you fork a project, you are making a copy of the whole project to your git hub account. you are not coping anything to your PC
To make a copy in your PC you have to clone it and pull all the stuff and you will got all branches & code of that project
This can be explained very well. You have a central repository at GitHub. Whenever you take a clone of it on your personal computer to do some changes, this local clone of the main repository is called a fork.
The branch is something different and is included in the fork/repo. Actually the branch is your work at different stage of development. They are created as and when required to save a set of functionalities, to give access to different users, to demonstrate the site to client, etc.
If you create a fork of a project from the Github website, you get all the branches from the upstream project.
If you clone from your newly minted fork to your local PC, you will have the origin remote on your PC pointing to the master branch of your fork on Github.
I would like to share a real life example of when we use Branches and when we use Forks
We have GitLab at our shop and sometimes we have to work on packages from a Laravel project. We normally create a branch and push changes to the branch that we have been testing in our local VM dev environment when working with the actual Laravel project.
Let's say our project is located at
https://github.com/yardpenalty/mainproject.git
Branch usage:
Lets say the branch is called It_doesnt_matter
Once we have our branch the way we want for production we then make our final push to this branch and create a merge request which then goes into UAT for testing.Once the test has went through QC the changes are merged into production.
The merge from the It_doesnt_matter branch is now pushed to the master project
at https://github.com/yardpenalty/mainproject.git
Let's say the package project is located at
https://github.com/yardpenalty/mypackage.git
Keep in mind the mainproject uses this package in production so we can't make changes by simply pushing them to this package (among other reasons). Let's say a web dev has to edit this package to make changes on production.
A simple branch wont work either because we can't see our changes without publishing the package etc.
Fork Usage:
Now is when we have to do a little bit of trickery with our package so we create a clone of the production package via a fork. The composer.json files can be updated to point to the fork which is now located at a User or Group path
So we will create a fork in https://github.com/yardpenalty/mypackage.git
and call it https://github.com/yardpenalty/yards/mypackage.git
Now we can update our composer.json file to point to this package in our "repositories":[ array like such such and away we go!
{
"type": "github",
"url": "https://github.com/yardpenalty/yard/mypackage.git"
}
]