My git workflow

In this episode of HPR I present the workflow I use to contribute to opensource projects using git. I have no idea if this workflow is something that is commonly used, but it is working for me, so I thought I’d share it with the HPR community.

The first thing I do is fork the project I want to contribute to. This is done on github most of the time, although this workflow can work on gitlab, bitbucket, or even some self hosted git platform.

Once the project is forked, I clone it on my machine :

$ git clone git://server/path/to/myproject.git

Git automatically names my remote project origin.

Then I add a reference to the original project :

$ git remote add upstream https://server/path/to/originalproject.git

Now my local repository references my fork under the name origin and the original project under the name upstream.

In this workflow, I never work on the master branch. So, when I need to fix a bug for example, I create a new branch :

$ git checkout -b bugfix

I can then make changes, test my code, make sure everything is ok, stage and commit my changes :

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "commit message"

Now I need to push this local branch to my repository on github :

$ git push -u origin bugfix

Since I forked the original project, github knows that origin and upstream are linked. If there are no conflicts, github will show me a big green button to create a pull request. Once the pull request is created, I just have to wait for the maintainer to merge it in upstream’s master branch. Then, I need to sync both my local copy and my fork on github with the original project. In order to do that, on my local copy, I checkout my master branch, fetch upstream’s changes, and merge them :

$ git checkout master
$ git fetch upstream
$ git merge upstream/master

Now my local master branch is ahead of origin’s master branch, so I push those changes to github :

$ git push

I don’t need the bugfix branches (the local one and the github one), so I can delete those :

$ git branch -d bugfix
$ git push origin -d bugfix

And now, my local repository is even with both origin and upstream, and I can start again.

To summarize, here’s the complete workflow :

$ git checkout -b myawesomefeature
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Awesome commit message"
$ git push -u origin myawesomefeature

Create a pull request, wait for the maintainer to merge it.

$ git checkout master
$ git fetch upstream
$ git merge upstream/master
$ git push
$ git branch -d myawesomefeature
$ git push origin -d myawesomefeature