I have been interested in Git, the distributed version control software since reading the first edition of Scott Chacon’s Git book way back in 2010. However outside of my own projects, my real world experience of using Git is relatively limited and it’s one of the skills I never seem to get around to improving on.

To change this, I have recently contributed to an open source project hosted on GitHub. The change I made can be found here and this post is my recollection of the process to help me and hopefully others just getting started with the GitHub workflow.

For a comprehensive guide to the GitHub workflow, I recommend reading Chapter 6 of the Git book.

Find a project that you want to contribute to.

Probably the most tricky step – there are so many projects how do you find one to contribute to? In my case I started with a project that I know and use. OraOpenSource/Logger which is a great tool for instrumenting Oracle PL/SQL code.

From there it’s a quick scan of the open issues. I picked one related to the documentation because I wanted to focus on the GitHub workflow. The challenging technical issues and enhancements will still be there once I have got up to speed with the GitHub way of working.

Once you have found a project, it is unlikely that you will be able to push your changes to it, so the next step is to fork it. This gives you a copy of the project within your users namespace which you can then make changes to.

Make the change

With the project forked, you can go ahead, create a topic branch and make the necessary changes to the files and once you are happy with them, push them back to your copy of the project.

Pull request and …..Oops!

When you are ready to contribute your changes back to the original project you need to create a pull request. Creating a pull request opens up a discussion thread with a code review focusing on your proposed change.

Don’t worry if the change is discussed or rejected. Dust yourself down and go again. I had my own oops moment with my first pull request as I had changed a URL from relative to absolute. Not a problem so I closed the initial pull request and created another which has now been accepted and merged into the project.

Make the world a better place

Apologies the for the heading, I have been enjoying Silicon Valley around the time this post was taking shape.  If not the world, your change no matter how small will make the project you are contributing to better and it gives you a public artefact that you can point to.

Summary

In this article I had written about my Git experience along with my first contribution to an open source project.