Cloning and collaborating

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So far, we’ve learnt how to create repositories, commit files, and push/pull the files to a remote source like GitHub. Here we’ll practice collaborating with someone else.

Two ways to collaborate

Forking, cloning, and pull requests

If your code is online on GitHub and has an open licence, anyone can fork (make a separate copy of) your repository and work on it.

Fork a repo and make a pull request

1. For this exercise, team up with someone near you. Share the URL of your repository with your team-mate.
2. Go to your team-mate’s repository on GitHub. Click on the Fork button on the top right of the page.
3. Once the repository has successfully forked, you’ll need to clone it onto your machine if you want to edit it. In GitHub desktop, go to File > Clone a repository. You should be able to find the repository you forked earlier. Select it and press “Clone”.
4. You should be able to work on the repository as normal now. Edit the file and make a commit - maybe you’ve helpfully taken something off your team-mate’s to-do list, or maybe you’ve fixed a typo in their documentation or helped them fix a bug.
5. Push the changes to GitHub, then go and look at your team-mate’s repository on GitHub. If you see a yellow notification offering to help you make a pull request, click it and move to step 6! If not:
   • Click on the “Pull requests” tab on the top, and then click the “new pull request” green button on the top right.
   • You may need to click compare across forks (blue link, top rightish).
   • The base fork should be your team-mate’s repository
   • The head fork should be your fork of the repository, where you’ve made the extra commit.
   • Click create new pull request.
6. Okay, now you should enter a description for your pull request - this might be the same as the commit message you made or it might be more detailed. This description is for your team-mate to review, so they know why you made the request, so don’t skip it!
7. Once you’re happy with your pull request description, click “Create Pull Request”. That’s it - you’ve made your first PR (Pull request) to someone else’s code base!

Review your team-mate’s PR

Once a PR is made, it isn’t automatically accepted. The repository owner doesn’t have to accept it, and they might even ask for changes or refuse it outright if the pull request has errors or doesn’t suit them for some reason.

1. Once your team-mate has made a pull request online, you should see the number (1) showing beside the “pull requests” tab in your repository. Visit the pull request and take a look through the various tabs
   • In the files changed tab you can see exactly what changed in each file
   • The commits tab shows all of the commits that go into this specific pull request that aren’t present in the base branch.
   • If you’re happy with the changes, hop back over to the conversation tab and click the big green “Merge pull request” button.
   • If you think there are changes or improvements to be made - leave a polite comment asking for clarification or changes!

The other way to collaborate - give someone repository access rights!

If you are working in a team with others you trust, you can edit repository settings so everyone who is working on the code can make commits directly to the same repository. Sometimes people will do this for small fixes, typos, etc. but still make pull requests for bigger changes - this allows collaborators to review your code before it’s merged into the main codebase, ensuring it has enough documentation and test it for bugs.

To add a collaborator to your repository, in your GitHub repository online, go to the settings tab (top leftish), then click on the “Collaborators and teams” link on the left.

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