Chaser324

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 j

gitaarik

Git Submodules basic explanation

Why submodules?

In Git you can add a submodule to a repository. This is basically a repository embedded in your main repository. This can be very useful. A couple of usecases of submodules:

• Separate big codebases into multiple repositories.

jagregory

So you've cloned somebody's repo from github, but now you want to fork it and contribute back. Never fear!

Technically, when you fork "origin" should be your fork and "upstream" should be the project you forked; however, if you're willing to break this convention then it's easy.

* Off the top of my head *

1. Fork their repo on Github
2. In your local, add a new remote to your fork; then fetch it, and push your changes up to it

    git remote add my-fork git@github...my-fork.git