Basic Contribution Workflow¶

This is a straightforward guide to contributing to a project on GitHub.

Prerequisites¶

Set up SSH authentication for the command line.
Have a repository to contribute to.
- For the sake of practice, you can create your own repository and use this workflow.
- If you don't want to create your own repo, the Professional Linux Users Group has a repository specifically for this purpose: https://github.com/ProfessionalLinuxUsersGroup/GitPracticeRepo

Contributing to an Existing Project¶

These instructions are for creating a feature branch to make a contribution to an existing repository on GitHub that you do not own yourself.

1. Create a fork of the repository in the Github Web UI.¶

If you're using your own repository, you can skip this step.

2. Clone your fork of the repository.¶

git clone git@github.com:your-username/your-fork.git
cd ./your-fork

3. Create a new feature branch.¶

git switch -c branch-name

4. Make your edits.¶

vi ./file.md
# Edit text
:wq

5. Stage your changes.¶

git add ./file.md

6. Commit your changes.¶

git commit -m "feat: Edited file.md"

7. Push your changes to your branch on your fork.¶

git push origin branch-name

8. Go to the GitHub web UI (back to your fork) and create a pull request from your fork.¶

A contributor with write access to the original repository will need to approve and merge your pull request.

Once that gets merged, continue on.

If you're doing this on a repository that you own yourself, you can merge the PR yourself by going to your repo -> Pull Requests -> click the PR you opened -> "Merge pull request."

9. Add original repo as a remote source¶

git remote add upstream https://github.com/original-place/original-repo.git

10. Pull from the updated original¶

git pull upstream main

Now your local clone is up to date and you gucci.