Introducing GitHub

Chapter 3. Editing

In this chapter we’ll look at how you can contribute to a project. We’ll start by looking at how to contribute to a project that you don’t have permission to push to by creating a fork and a pull request. We’ll then look at how you can add, edit, rename, or delete a file directly on GitHub. We’ll also look at how to work with directories on GitHub, and finally we’ll discuss what to do when you want to make multiple changes as part of a single commit.

Contributing via a Fork

If you want to contribute directly to a project, you either need to own it or have been added to it as a collaborator. If you want to contribute to a project that you don’t own and are not a collaborator on, you’ll need to make a copy of it on GitHub under your user account. That process is called forking. Once you’ve forked a project, you’ll be able to make any changes you want to your fork (copy) and you’ll be able to request that your changes get incorporated into the original project by using a pull request. Let’s go through that process now.

Go to https://github.com/pragmaticlearning/github-example. Click the Fork button in the top right corner of the page, as shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1. The Fork button

When you click the Fork button, if you are a member of any organizations, you’ll see a list of all of the organizations you’re involved with as well as your username. You’ll be ...