Make Your First Open Source Contribution
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By making open-source contributions, you will learn a lot. Open-source contributions allow you to become a part of the open-source community. It can be hard at the beginning, but it’s definitely worth it.
How do you make a pull request? How do you ask the maintainers to merge it?
Let’s get started!
First of all, you should know the basics of Git. You’ll need a GitHub account as well. If you don’t have one, you can create it here.
Step 1: Find a project you want to contribute to.
If you want to practice a little bit first, you can use this demo repository.
Don’t worry, I created it for this purpose.
Step 2: Fork the repository.
Once you’re there, click the “Fork” button.
This will copy the whole project under your GitHub user.
The link will look like this https://github.com/<YourUsername>/git-demo.
Step 3: Clone the repository.
Open your terminal, and run the following command:
git clone https://github.com/<YourUsername>/git-demo.git
This will create a local copy of the repository.
Step 4: Create a new remote for the upstream repository.
git remote add upstream https://github.com/markodenic/git-demo.git
Step 5: Create a new branch.
git checkout -b my-branch
This will create a new branch, and switch to it.
Step 6: Add some code.
Now, the time has come, you actually add some code. 😊
After adding the changes, you can check them by running git status.
If everything is as expected, you can add the code to the staging area:
git add .
Step 7: Commit your changes.
Run the command:
git commit -m "Add an awesome feature to my-branch"
Step 8: Push the changes to your repository.
Finally, you’re ready to push the changes.
git push is the command we need in this case. Let’s run it:
git push -u origin my-branch
Step 9: Create a pull request.
Once we push the changes to our repository, we are ready to open the pull request.
Go back to your repository and click on the “Compare and Pull Request” button.
If everything goes OK, the maintainer of the repository will merge your pull request.
Congratulations, you made your first open-source contribution!
Quick recap:
1. Find a project you want to contribute to.
2. Fork the repo.
3. Clone the repository.
4. Create a new remote for the upstream repository.
5. Create a new branch.
6. Add your changes.
7. Commit your changes.
8. Push the changes to your repository.
9. Create a pull request.
See you on GitHub.
If you want to learn more about Git, check out this article Git Commands Cheat Sheet.