Working with others

This document assumes that you have a GitHub account. Suppose you want to contribute code to a particular GitHub maintained project (we will use the BSDA project as an example).

  1. Fork the repository of interest.
  2. Use RStudio to make a local copy of the Project. (Walk through in class)
  3. Hadley suggests creating a branch when making code changes to both projects you control and those you do not control.

To create a branch open a shell and type:

git checkout -b newbranch-name

After issuing the last command with the newbranch_name (names should be in lowercase letters and numbers, with - used to separate words), make changes as normal. Note that the push/pull icons in RStudio are disabled. To enable them, you will first need to tell GitHub that your local branch has a remote equivalent by using the following:

git push --set-upstream origin newbranch-name

You should now be able to push any commits to your remote branch. In this document, GitHub user susiearnholt created the branch patch4 and pushed changes to her remote branch on GitHub.

  1. Switch to your branch (above the branch is master - we want patch4)

  1. Make sure the Branch:master is even with alanarnholt:master. (See below)

  2. Click Compare & pull request

  1. Click the Create pull request
  1. If the project works with Travis-CI, make sure all checks pass. The package BSDA uses Travis-CI. The result is shown below.
  1. GitHub automatically sends an email to the project owner (Me in this case) which is shown below.
  1. After some discussion, the project owner will click the Merge pull request button if the changes are approved. Note that GitHub will ask you to confirm the merge before the transaction is complete.

Syncing your fork/branches

Once a pull request is honored, your fork and branches will be out of sync with the owners. To sync your branches and fork, open a shell and type the following:

git remote add upstream <owner repo.git>

For this exercise, the repository of interest is https://github.com/alanarnholt/BSDA.git.

git remote add upstream https://github.com/alanarnholt/BSDA.git
git pull upstream master

At this point, you should click pull then push. Your branch should be even with the owners. Follow the same process to get the forked master in sync with the owner/master.