Filing issues and pull requests using git hub

Have you ever wanted to more involved in the open source community but just didn't know where to start? have you ever been intimidated by git hub and how to use it? Well getting started with and contributing to the open source community has never been easier, especially when using github. Today i'm going to make a step by step tutorial on how to contribute to any open source project you'd like. You don't need to be the best programmer in the world to contribute, technically you don't even need to know ANY programming at all to contribute to a project. For our example today i'll be fixing a very small spelling error in a project. For the purposes of this tutorial I will only be going over the steps on how to use github to file issues and making pull request.


Filing Issues:
After you've found a project that you'd like to contribute to, you can click on the "issue" tab at the top of the repository page and click the green "New issue" button, or if you'd like to get more specific, you can go to the file right on github and click on the line number where you've found an issue. For this example i've found a very small spelling error on line 41 of the index.html file.





Once you clicked the line number, github will show a small rectangle with 3 dots beside the line number, you can click this to show you more options. Were going to select "Reference in new issue", github will redirect us to the new issue page just like if you were to select new issue from the issue tab that i mentioned earlier. However using this method, github will actually add the necessary references to that part of the code for ease of use.





Now we can add a tittle and comments to the issue we are filing. Its best practice to keep the title short but descriptive, but in the comment section you're free to add as much detail as you'd like to describe the issue. For this example, our comment is going to be very short because its only a small spelling error. Once you've finished with your comments, you can click the green "Submit new issue" and the repository owner will be notified.


Once the owner receives the issue they are able to fix it, but were actually going to fix the issue ourselves and make a pull request to the repository owner.

We can start by clicking the "fork" button on the top right of the repository page, this will copy everything from the repo to a new repository in your github account.


Once thats complete, you can go to your github account and clone the project on to your local machine. I will not be going over the details of what editor to use or how to fix the code in this tutorial.

New Pull Requests:
When you're done making the necessary adjustments to the code and you've successfully pushed the updates to your github account, you can go to the repository on your github account and click the "New pull request" button to initiate a new pull request from the original repo owner.




Now you're given an option to select which repo you'd like the pull request to come from and where it should go. For this example i've selected the master branch of my forked repository (shown on the right), and id like the request to go to the master branch of the original repo(shown on the left). Now we can click the green "Create pull request" button and the owner of the repository will be notified, they will be able to review the changes you've made and ultimately accept or deny the changes that you made.




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