GitHub Standard Fork & Pull Request Workflow

GitHub-Forking.md

Whether you're trying to give back to the open source community or collaborating on your own projects, knowing how to properly fork and generate pull requests is essential. Unfortunately, it's quite easy to make mistakes or not know what you should do when you're initially learning the process. I know that I certainly had considerable initial trouble with it, and I found a lot of the information on GitHub and around the internet to be rather piecemeal and incomplete - part of the process described here, another there, common hangups in a different place, and so on.

In an attempt to coallate this information for myself and others, this short tutorial is what I've found to be fairly standard procedure for creating a fork, doing your work, issuing a pull request, and merging that pull request back into the original project.

Creating a Fork

Just head over to the GitHub page and click the "Fork" button. It's just that simple. Once you've done that, you can use your favorite git client to clone your repo or just head straight to the command line:

# Clone your fork to your local machine
git clone git@github.com:USERNAME/FORKED-PROJECT.git

Keeping Your Fork Up to Date

While this isn't an absolutely necessary step, if you plan on doing anything more than just a tiny quick fix, you'll want to make sure you keep your fork up to date by tracking the original "upstream" repo that you forked. To do this, you'll need to add a remote:

# Add 'upstream' repo to list of remotes
git remote add upstream https://github.com/UPSTREAM-USER/ORIGINAL-PROJECT.git

# Verify the new remote named 'upstream'
git remote -v

Whenever you want to update your fork with the latest upstream changes, you'll need to first fetch the upstream repo's branches and latest commits to bring them into your repository:

# Fetch from upstream remote
git fetch upstream

# View all branches, including those from upstream
git branch -va

Now, checkout your own master branch and merge the upstream repo's master branch:

# Checkout your master branch and merge upstream
git checkout master
git merge upstream/master

If there are no unique commits on the local master branch, git will simply perform a fast-forward. However, if you have been making changes on master (in the vast majority of cases you probably shouldn't be - see the next section, you may have to deal with conflicts. When doing so, be careful to respect the changes made upstream.

Now, your local master branch is up-to-date with everything modified upstream.

Doing Your Work

Create a Branch

Whenever you begin work on a new feature or bugfix, it's important that you create a new branch. Not only is it proper git workflow, but it also keeps your changes organized and separated from the master branch so that you can easily submit and manage multiple pull requests for every task you complete.

To create a new branch and start working on it:

# Checkout the master branch - you want your new branch to come from master
git checkout master

# Create a new branch named newfeature (give your branch its own simple informative name)
git branch newfeature

# Switch to your new branch
git checkout newfeature

Now, go to town hacking away and making whatever changes you want to.

Submitting a Pull Request

Cleaning Up Your Work

Prior to submitting your pull request, you might want to do a few things to clean up your branch and make it as simple as possible for the original repo's maintainer to test, accept, and merge your work.

If any commits have been made to the upstream master branch, you should rebase your development branch so that merging it will be a simple fast-forward that won't require any conflict resolution work.

# Fetch upstream master and merge with your repo's master branch
git fetch upstream
git checkout master
git merge upstream/master

# If there were any new commits, rebase your development branch
git checkout newfeature
git rebase master

Now, it may be desirable to squash some of your smaller commits down into a small number of larger more cohesive commits. You can do this with an interactive rebase:

# Rebase all commits on your development branch
git checkout 
git rebase -i master

This will open up a text editor where you can specify which commits to squash.

Submitting

Once you've committed and pushed all of your changes to GitHub, go to the page for your fork on GitHub, select your development branch, and click the pull request button. If you need to make any adjustments to your pull request, just push the updates to GitHub. Your pull request will automatically track the changes on your development branch and update.

Accepting and Merging a Pull Request

Take note that unlike the previous sections which were written from the perspective of someone that created a fork and generated a pull request, this section is written from the perspective of the original repository owner who is handling an incoming pull request. Thus, where the "forker" was referring to the original repository as upstream, we're now looking at it as the owner of that original repository and the standard origin remote.

Checking Out and Testing Pull Requests

Open up the .git/config file and add a new line under [remote "origin"]:

fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/pull/origin/*

Now you can fetch and checkout any pull request so that you can test them:

# Fetch all pull request branches
git fetch origin

# Checkout out a given pull request branch based on its number
git checkout -b 999 pull/origin/999

Keep in mind that these branches will be read only and you won't be able to push any changes.

Automatically Merging a Pull Request

In cases where the merge would be a simple fast-forward, you can automatically do the merge by just clicking the button on the pull request page on GitHub.

Manually Merging a Pull Request

To do the merge manually, you'll need to checkout the target branch in the source repo, pull directly from the fork, and then merge and push.

# Checkout the branch you're merging to in the target repo
git checkout master

# Pull the development branch from the fork repo where the pull request development was done.
git pull https://github.com/forkuser/forkedrepo.git newfeature

# Merge the development branch
git merge newfeature

# Push master with the new feature merged into it
git push origin master

Now that you're done with the development branch, you're free to delete it.

git branch -d newfeature

Copyright

Copyright 2017, Chase Pettit

MIT License, http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

Additional Reading

• Atlassian - Merging vs. Rebasing

Sources

• GitHub - Fork a Repo
• GitHub - Syncing a Fork
• GitHub - Checking Out a Pull Request

Excellent write up and very helpful. Thank you!

Does anybody know if there is a way to avoid having to do the workflow described here?
https://gist.github.com/Chaser324/ce0505fbed06b947d962#gistcomment-2059020

If I am submitting multiple separate pull requests, each fixing one issue, to upstream, and they can be applied without conflicts, there should be a simple way to specify this in GitHub itself. This is the right way to do it if I am going to email a patch set, but I would expect GitHub to provide an easier way. I am doing local branch manipulations purely to get a clean pull request; it has no benefit to my local workflow.

Great very helpful! Thanks 👍

Thank you! This alongside the Atlassian article you linked cleared up a lot for me.

I've just set up my first repository (I've never used Github or git before, except to download other people's code). I want to make some changes to my code, but when I try to create a fork (on Github), it tells me "Cannot fork because you own this repository and are not a member of any organizations". Well, it's true that I'm not a member of any organization, I'm just a single developer working on my own. What am I doing wrong? Is my repository set up incorrectly? Don't I need to create a fork? I'm somewhat confused.

@dfkettle This workflow is meant for working on projects with others. If you're working on your own project, you can skip making forks. Just make changes directly onto your repository. The only steps from here you need to worry about are under "Doing Your Work" to create branches for new features. Once you're done making changes in your branch, you can create a pull request in Github to merge your updated branch into the master branch.

Try Googling "git workflow solo developer".

@swquader Thanks.

so I'll admit I'm a git n00b.

I have the following real case I'd like to accomplish.
I have a fork of the following github project: https://github.com/ldthomas/apg-java
This project I forked from has one branch, master.
My fork is at https://github.com/ssill2/apg-java
I have created a branch of master called "maven" and made a number of changes there.

I've been coordinating with the author of the project I forked from. We'd like to take the branch called "maven" in my fork and somehow bring that branch to his repo without affecting master. I looked at the pull request stuff but it seems like maven needs to exist in his repo for this to work. Is this possible? I feel like it should be given the way that git works, or at least how I understand it to work lol

I have a fork of the following github project: https://github.com/ldthomas/apg-java
This project I forked from has one branch, master.
My fork is at https://github.com/ssill2/apg-java
I have created a branch of master called "maven" and made a number of changes there.

We'd like to take the branch called "maven" in my fork and somehow bring that branch to his repo without affecting master.

@ssill2:

You’re looking for
github.com/ssill2/apg-java/pull/new/maven, which I found by going to your branch’s GitHub page
github.com/ssill2/apg-java/tree/maven where there’s a message like

This branch is 9 commits ahead of ldthomas:master.

You want the “Contribute” button next to it which will send you to the form where you can suggest that your changes be merged into
github.com/ldthomas/apg-java/tree/master.

oh that sounds exactly like I'm looking for.

The original author doesn't want to merge my branch into master just yet, but he's definite interested in having my maven branch as part of his repo.

I'll give this a go. Thank you!

Ok, I think I was on the right track before, but is throwing me:

The way that seems to read is that it's going to merge to master which is what I'm trying to avoid. Or am I just reading that incorrectly?

Ask the original author to create a new branch. Then you open a pull request from your fork+branch to this new branch rather than master.

yeah that's what I was thinking too. thanks!

Hi,

Just wondering if it is just about changing master to main now the default for Github git init is now the main branch, not the master branch/ https://github.com/github/renaming#new-repositories-use-main-as-the-default-branch-name

New repositories use main as the default branch name
The default branch name for new repositories created on GitHub is now main. To set a different default:

For users, on the https://github.com/settings/repositories page
For organization owners, on the https://github.com/organizations/YOUR-ORGANIZATION/settings/repository-defaults page
For enterprise administrators, on the https://github.com/enterprises/YOUR-ENTERPRISE/settings/member_privileges page
Users, organizations, and enterprises that previously selected a default branch for new repositories are not impacted by this change. Existing repositories are also not impacted by this change.

Why main?
main is the most popular replacement for master that we're seeing across GitHub. We like it because it's short, it keeps your muscle memory intact, and it translates well across most languages. We're using main for our newly-created repositories and for the repositories we're moving now, like dependabot-core.

@davan690 Good suggestion. I'll update this post to reflect the new default branch naming later this week.

Nice Work!

I have been wondering about the process of submitting an issue, like a bug report, while also submitting a PR that includes a fix for that issue. If you have any thoughts about this, it would be great to expand upon it in the article.

It looks like this could use an update: changing master to main.

How can you add commits to the incoming pull request and push it to the pull/origin/#PRNUMBER branch?

How can you add commits to the incoming pull request and push it to the pull/origin/#PRNUMBER branch?

I second that request, it's a missing in the workflow at Submitting it just says: "Once you've committed and pushed all of your changes to GitHub, .." How do we get our local commits on the new local branch on GH?

Oddly, this is missing something very fundamental. In the "Submitting" section it merely says "Once you've committed and pushed all of your changes to GitHub", it should state exactly how to do this push. So a better tutorial is https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-pull-request-on-github.

Great article! Thank you for the time and effort spent on this to give back to the community!