Quick Notes

Things that came on the way

Setting Up to Contribute Using Git

Basic steps if you are planning to contribute to an existing project currently on GitHub.

  • Create an account on GitHub.
  • Create a fork of the project repository on GitHub.
  • Create a Git repository on your local machine. This requires Git to be available on the machine
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git clone https://github.com/your-user-name/repository-name -b branch-name
  • Note the -b option is used to specify a particular branch you want to work on in the project. You can verify the branch the local repository is pointing to by
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git branch
  • The repository created locally by the clone points to the fork which was created by you on GitHub
  • You would also want to pull in all the changes happening in the project repository like changes from other contributers
  • Inorder to be able to pull the changes, set “upstream” to point to the project repository. CD to your local repository and issue the following command.
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git remote add upstream https://github.com/project-or-user-name/repository-name
  • You can verify the “origin” and the “upstream” repositories your local repository is pointing to by issuing the following command
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git remote -v
  • Inorder to update your local repository with any changes in the project repository, issue the following command
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git pull upstream
  • Git wll perform automerge of changes where possible and if there are any conflicts they need to be resolved manually
  • Make the changes you wish to make to the project repository on your local machine and once satisfied follow these steps
  • Perform a pull upstream to make sure that your repository is upto date with project repository
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git pull upstream
  • Commit all your changes to the local respository. This step will ask to enter comments about the change etc.
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git commit -a
  • Push the changes to GitHub which will update the fork you had created initially. This step will prompt for your GitHub user-id and password
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git push -u branch-name
  • You can verify that the changes are on your fork by browsing the changed components through GitHub web interface
  • Once satisfied with your changes, you can make a pull request using the pull request icon on the GitHub web interface
  • If the project owner is fine with the changes, the changes will get merged into the project repository. Then the changes will be available for everyone to use.
  • Few other useful commands
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git stash

This will revert back all the changes made in the local repository

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git rebase -i HEAD~n

Where n is a number and this will help in merging multiple commits into fewer so that the change history is much cleaner. - This is a very quick summary of steps. Git documents provide details, options and other useful commands which you may want to look at

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