Introduction to Version Control

Here on the GitHub dashboard, you can search for repositories, or GitHub also shows you repositories it thinks might interest you. To continue with the sourdough demo, search for other repositories mentioning sourdough.

Click each repository in the list to explore it. Once you’ve found one you like, click the “Fork” button to make your fork. Once the information on the form looks good, create your fork. Now, you have a copy of the repository.

Because this is a new fork, it’s up to date with the original. Forking and pull requests are part of GitHub, not Git. So when I’m working with a local clone of this repository, there will be no indication it’s a fork.

Returning to the original, you can see at the top there are pull requests. Click the “Pull requests” button. In an open-source project, people offer to fix bugs in a codebase, but you’ll also see pull requests for translations into other languages or improvements to documentation.

Open a pull request, and you can see who made the request and the changes they’ve proposed. Click “Files changed” to see the actual changes.

Moving your mouse over the left margin of the changes makes little plus-sign buttons appear. Clicking any of those lets you make a comment tagged to that particular line and starts a discussion.

You can see all the pull requests you’ve been working with using the “Pull requests” button here, next to your profile image. Clicking the pull-request title opens it. It looks much like the public request, but because this is a pull request to a private repository and I’m logged in as the owner, I can see that I can merge this request.

After I merge the request, GitHub offers to delete the branch. This will delete the branch on the remote. However, now I can also delete the branch on my local. If you try to delete a local branch published to a remote, Git gives you an error.

Now, in GitHub Desktop, create the pull request without going to the GitHub website. Switch to a branch that has changes but has never been published to the remote. Once those changes are committed, GitHub Desktop offers to start a pull request. It creates the request and then opens the GitHub website in a browser so you can finish creating the request.

Click the “Code” button instead of creating the request. Notice this banner that appears, saying you’ve recently published a branch. Click the “Compare and Pull Request” button to get to the new request form.