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@wtbarnes
Created March 5, 2020 04:49
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Brief instructions for how to modify and push to someone else's PR on github

How to Push to Someone Else's Pull Request

Let's say contributor has submitted a pull request to your (author) project (repo). They have made changes on their branch feature and have proposed to merge this into origin/master, where

origin -> https://github.com/author/repo.git

Now say you would like to make commits to their PR and push those changes. First, add their fork as a remote called contributor,

> git remote add contributor https://github.com/contributor/repo.git 

such that,

> git remote -v
origin      https://github.com/author/repo.git (fetch)
origin      https://github.com/author/repo.git (push)
contributor   https://github.com/contributor/repo.git  (fetch) 
contributor   https://github.com/contributor/repo.git  (push)

Next, pull down their list of branches,

> git fetch contributor

and create a new branch (contributor-feature) from the branch that they have created the PR from,

> git checkout -b contributor-feature contributor/feature

Now make any changes you need to make on this branch. If you'd like to rebase this PR on top of the master branch of the primary repository,

> git rebase origin/master

Finally, push the changes back up to the PR by pushing to their branch,

git push contributor contributor-feature:feature

Note that if you did a rebase, you'll need to add the --force (or -f) flag after push. The author of the PR also may need to explicitly allow you to push to their branch.

Helpful Links

@Blaumaus
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Thank you for this tutorial.

@edimetia3d
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The author of the PR also may need to explicitly allow you to push to their branch.

Another note:

  1. It seems only maintainer of author/repo.git could push commit to contributor's branch.
  2. As a contributor, you need to un-check the Allow edits by maintainers box in PR page to disable maintainer's pushing permission, and it is checked by default.

It bothered me for a while, because someone pushed code into my fork, I just feel somehow strange.

@Anas-mhameed
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Thank you so much my friend

@projectkepler-ru
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based

@stephenwaite
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bradys-panda

@silverqx
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I thought that's how it works, but it still helped me a lot to get my bearings (orientate). Thx

@kurtaking
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Still helped me out in 2024. Thanks 😄

@jbw976
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jbw976 commented Oct 1, 2024

I've probably used this page like 15-20+ times by now - thank you very much! 🙇‍♂️

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