Collaborating

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How can I use version control to collaborate with other people?

Objectives

• Clone a remote repository.

• Collaborate pushing to a common repository.

This part of the lesson is modified from this Source

You can contribute to whatever project you like. Suppose you would like to add a new feature to someone else’s project. You can always propose your changes; in GitHub language, this is known as pull request.

Steps for making pull requests (or PRs):

• go to the project you want to contribute to: https://github.com/AnnaWilliford/SWC_Spring2018_lessons.

• copy the project to your GitHub account by clicking fork button on the top right corner of the page.

You should now have a new repository called SWC_Spring2018_lessons in YOUR account. You can now copy other projects/repositories to your GitHub account!

You can also copy a remote repository to the local machine, let’s say, to the Desktop. From your local terminal, type:

$ git clone https://github.com/YourUsername/SWC_2018-02-25.git ~/Desktop/SWC_Spring2018_lessons.git

You now have all lessons both on your GitHub account and on your local machine! And, of course, you have access to any public repository on GitHub in a similar way.

Now, what is even better, you can contribute to the project you forked/cloned(copied) by suggesting changes to the documents in the repository. If, for example, you find a better way to explain some topic we were covering in this workshop, you can make changes to the lessons locally on your machine and then send a pull request to the owner of repository. The owner will review your changes and decide to accept(merge) proposed changes or reject them.

Want to try?

Go to SWC_Spring2018_lessons repo on your local machine and open a new topic branch for the project:

$ git checkout -b YourName

You can now modify and add anything you want in this project. When ready with your final contributions, you will be able to send your pull request.

For example, add your create new file.

#create new file
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "add new file"

#Push your topic branch up to your fork:
$ git push origin YourName

Go to the forked repo on your GitHub account and click on the green compare & pull request button

A bit more terminology here: base fork is the repository you’d like to merge changes into. Use the base branch drop-down menu to select the branch of the upstream repository you’d like to merge changes into.

Use the head fork drop-down menu to select your fork, then use the compare branch drop-down menu to select the branch you made your changes in.

Type a title and description for your pull request.

Click Create pull request

The owner of repository will get notification about pull request and will review your proposed changes.

Key Points

• git clone copies a remote repository to create a local repository with a remote called origin automatically set up.