Contributing to Open Source via GitHub
- 1. Contributing to an Open Source project on GitHub Andy Waite June 2012
- 2. Why contribute? Learn a technology outside of your day job Scratch an itch Remove a blocker Learn by peer review Collaborate and share knowlege Promote yourself and get noticed Your portfolio is your CV Coderwall
- 3. What to contribute? Fix a bug for a problem you’ve discovered Add behaviour for a new feature you want Resolve an issue reported by someone else Improve the documentation (what confused you?) Expand the test coverage Provide a example
- 4. The old way Mailing lists, FTP servers diff oldFile newFile > mods.diff patch < mods.diff SourceForge
- 5. The new way GitHub - founded in 2008 Now over 1.7 million users, 3 million repos Code, issues, wiki, hosting, stats, social, API Major projects: Node, Rails, jQuery, Backbone, Linux Kernel, PHP, Zend 2, Symfony, Underscore, Git, Wordpress, Drupal Big companies: Google, Microsoft, Apple All free for public projects
- 6. Getting started Create a GitHub account Setup Git Identify the original project (beware of forks) Check for signs of life
- 7. Fork the original project One click to fork into your account andyw8/WidgetMagic → samfrench/WidgetMagic Clones the full history, branches, tags
- 8. Clone your fork locally git clone [email protected]:samfrench/WidgetMagic.git cd WidgetMagic
- 9. Run the test suite Install the dependencies Run the test suite Common language conventions: Ruby: rake Java: mvn
- 10. Create a topic branch Use one branch per topic (bug, feature, etc.) git checkout -b allow-duplicate-widgets Display the current branch in your shell prompt
- 11. Commit your change git add WidgetMagic.rb git commit -m "Allow duplicate widgets"
- 12. Push to your remote repo git push origin allow-duplicate-widgets
- 13. Create a pull request Pull Request button appears on your repo A pull request starts a conversation It might not be accepted right away Improve it and push the new commits
- 14. Merging the pull request Project maintainer merges your commits and closes the pull request GitHub sends you an notification Your contribution shows in the commit log
- 15. Stay up-to-date A few months later you want to contribute again But changes to the original project don’t propogate automatically so your fork becomes out-of-date git remote add upstream git:// github.com/andyw8/WidgetMagic.git git fetch upstream get merge upstream master
- 16. Social coding Promote your contribution Maintainers - thank your contributors
- 17. In summary Start with the smallest contribution you can find, e.g. fixing a typo Share half-formed ideas. Code is better than words. Start your own project!