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@eclectic-coding
Created February 6, 2020 23:09
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TLTR: Create a Pull Request

  1. Fork this repository.
  2. Clone the your new repository to your system.
  3. Create a new branch (i.e. add/your-name).
  4. Commit changes and push the new branch.
  5. Open and submit a PR.

If you have never opened a PR and need direction, read more below.

Contributor's Guide

Feedback, bug reports, and pull requests are welcome. Feel free to ask for help.

Working on your first Pull Request? You can learn how from this free series How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

This guide has been modified from freeCodeCamp's Contributors Guide

Forking the Project

Setting Up Your System

  1. Install Git or your favorite Git client.
  2. (Optional) Setup an SSH Key for GitHub.

Forking Developer Portfolios

  1. Go to the top level page of this repository
  2. Click the "Fork" Button in the upper right hand corner of the interface (More Details Here)
  3. After the repository (repo) has been forked, you will be taken to your copy of the Developer Portfolios repo at https://github.com/yourUsername/this-repo

Cloning Your Fork

  1. Open a Terminal / Command Line / Bash Shell in your project's directory (i.e.: /yourprojectdirectory/)
  2. Clone your fork of
$ git clone https://github.com/yourUsername/this-repo.git

(make sure to replace yourUsername with your GitHub username)

This will download the entire repo to your project's directory.

Setup Your Upstream

  1. Change directory to the new directory (cd ./this-repo)
  2. Add a remote to the original repo:
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/eclectic-coding/this-repo.git

Congratulations, you now have a local copy of the repo!

Maintaining Your Fork

Now that you have a copy of your fork, there is work you will need to do to keep it current.

Rebasing from Upstream

Do this prior to every time you create a branch for a PR:

  1. Make sure you are on the master branch
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

If your aren't on master, resolve outstanding files / commits and checkout the master branch

$ git checkout master
  1. Do a pull with rebase against master
$ git pull --rebase upstream master

This will pull down all of the changes to the official master branch, without making an additional commits in your local repo.

  1. Merge remote changes to your local master fork:
$ git merge upstream/master

Create a Branch

Before you start working, you will need to create a separate branch specific to the issue / feature you're working on. You will push your work to this branch.

Naming Your Branch

There several strategies for naming branches.

You could name the branch something like fix/xxx or feature/xxx where xxx is a short description of the changes or feature you are attempting to add. For example fix/email-login would be a branch where you fix something specific to email login.

We'd recommend to name it something that relevant to your new site (i.e. add/your-name

Adding Your Branch

To create a branch on your local machine (and switch to this branch):

$ git checkout -b [add/your-name]

and to push to GitHub:

$ git push origin [add/your-name]

If you need more help with branching, take a look at this.

Creating a Pull Request

What is a Pull Request?

A pull request (PR) is a method of submitting your new site to the (or any repo, for that matter). You will make changes to copies of the files in a personal fork, then apply to have them accepted by the original repo.

Need Help?

Feel free to ask for help, we are here to help.

Important: ALWAYS EDIT ON A BRANCH

Take away only one thing from this document: Never, EVER make edits to the staging branch. ALWAYS make a new branch BEFORE you edit files. This is critical, because if your PR is not accepted, your copy of staging will be forever sullied and the only way to fix it is to delete your fork and re-fork.

Methods

There are two methods of creating a pull request for 'Developer Portfolios':

  • Editing files on a local clone (recommended)
  • Editing files via the GitHub Interface
Method 1: Editing via your Local Fork (Recommended)

This is the recommended method. Read about How to Setup and Maintain a Local Instance.

  1. Perform the maintenance step of rebasing master.

  2. Ensure you are on the master branch using git status:

    $ git status
    On branch master
    Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
    
    nothing to commit, working directory clean
    
  3. If you are not on master or your working directory is not clean, resolve any outstanding files/commits and checkout git checkout master

  4. Create a branch off of develop with git: git checkout -b add/your-name

  5. Edit your file(s) locally with the editor of your choice.

  6. Check your git status to see unstaged files.

  7. Add your edited files: git add path/to/filename.ext You can also do: git add . to add all unstaged files. Take care, though, because you can accidentally add files you don't want added. Review your git status first.

  8. Commit your edits. git commit -m "your-commit-message"

Please make sure to write a commit message that summarizes the changes. If you find yourself in the need to use and it might be better to do two separate commits.

See Useful Tips for writing better Git commit messages for inspiration.

As a note, use the presrnt tense for your commit messages (i.e. Add instead of Added).

  1. If you would want to add/remove changes to previous commit, add the files as in Step 5 earlier, and use git commit --amend or git commit --amend --no-edit (for keeping the same commit message).

  2. Push your commits to your GitHub Fork: git push origin add/your-name

  3. Once the edits have been committed, you will be prompted to create a pull request on your fork's GitHub Page.

  4. By default, all pull requests should be against the main repo, master branch. Make sure that your Base Fork is set to this-repo/master when raising a Pull Request.

  5. Submit a pull request from your branch to master branch.

  6. The title (also called the subject) of your PR should be descriptive of your changes and succinctly indicate what is being fixed.

    • Do not add the issue number in the PR title or commit message.

    • Examples: Add site NAME

Next Steps

If your PR is accepted

Once your PR is accepted, you may delete the branch you created to submit it. This keeps your working fork clean.

You can do this with a press of a button on the GitHub PR interface. You can delete the local copy of the branch with: git branch -D branch/to-delete-name

If your PR comes back

Don't despair! You are probably being asked to make a formatting change. If you have a local copy of the repo, you can make the requested changes, commit them and push them to your fork.

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