To review PRs these commands are helpful. 🚀

ReviewPRCommands.md

Every open source contributor at some point reviews pull requests. Pulling the contents of the PR locally is important to test the code. Many a times reviewers themselves want to fix stuff on the PR like merge conflicts, typos. GitHub has documentation to deal with this but I never found those simple enough so here's the way I suggest reviewing PRs:

Keep in mind upstream refers to the original repository from which you forked and your own forked copy is called origin.

Note: Things in UPPERCASE are placeholders for some GitHub specific values. You'll understand them by reading.

# Fetch PR
git fetch upstream refs/pull/PULLREQ_NUMBER/head:pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER

PULLREQ_NUMBER is the pull request number / id you see on GitHub.

refs/pull/PULLREQ_NUMBER/head:pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER says to pull all the commits of PR PULLREQ_NUMBER and pipe all those to a new local branch pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER.

# Checkout PR's branch
git checkout pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER

After checking out pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER the PR's contents are availble for your local use.

If you want to push commit(s) to this PR you can do that too very easily. Continue reading.

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You can push a commit to the PR only if you have write access (or push access) on the upstream repository. This is helpful when you want to work on a PR together or maybe you want to resolve a large conflict for first time contributors.

# Assuming you have fetched the PR & checked out to pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER by following above steps

# Make changes to files, resolve conflicts. Then add all the modified files
git add .

# Commit your changes
git commit

# Push to PR creator's branch
git push https://github.com/USERNAME_OF_PR_CREATOR/REPONAME.git pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER:PR_CREATOR_BRANCH_NAME

In above, git add, git commit are self explanatory.

git push https://github.com/USERNAME_OF_PR_CREATOR/REPONAME.git pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER:PR_BRANCH_NAME looks confusing at first.

We are telling git to push to https://github.com/USERNAME_OF_PR_CREATOR/REPONAME.git which is PR_CREATOR's fork. pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER:PR_CREATOR_BRANCH_NAME means to push commits of your local pr-PULLREQ_NUMBER branch to PR_CREATOR_BRANCH.

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