Git workflow for contributing to open source projects

Motivation

This blog explains a workflow for contributing your code to other people's repositories. If you are new to this and have never contributed to an open source repo, this will be helpful.

Workflow

Forking the repository

The first step is to fork the repository you want to contribute to. Forking a repository is basically creating a new repository that is an exact copy of the original one, and is linked to it.

To fork a repository, click the Fork button in the upper right corner of the repository's page.

Cloning the repository

This step is stright forward. Clone the repo you just forked to your local machine. Be sure to clone the forked repository, not the original one.

Configuring remotes

By default, Git already added a remote called origin when you cloned the repository. You can see it by running git remote command. This remote points to your forked repository.

You will need to add one more remote that points back to the original repository. You can do that by running git remote add [remote_name] [url]. The convention is to call this remote upstream, but you can use any name you want.

Now, if you run git remote again, you should see two remotes: origin and upstream (assuming that you named the second remote upstream).

Creating a branch, pushing and opening a pull request

You are ready to start making changes to the code. Create and checkout to a new branch by running git checkout -b [branch_name] command.

Once you've made the changes to the code, commit the changes and push them to github by running git push origin [branch_name]. Origin in the command denotes that you are pushing changes to the forked repository.

Now go to Github and open a pull request from your branch to the original repository.

Cleanup and maintenance

Once the maintainers merge your pull request (hopefully), you can delete your working branch by running git branch -d [branch_name], then run git push origin main to push the deletion of the branch to your remote repository.

To keep your fork in sync with the original repository, use git pull upstream main command.