Git For Non-Developers

So you're handling a translation, or you're contributing to a theme, and every time you make a pull request you have to talk to one of the developers before your changes can be merged in?

Chances are, you just haven't found a quick how-to explaining how to keep things in sync on your end.  It's really very easy.

After you've created a fork of the repo (just click "fork" at github), you need to clone your own copy.

For the sake of examples, we'll assume you're working on a theme called redexample (which does not exist).

git clone https://github.com/username/red.git

Once you've done that, cd into the directory, and add an upstream.


cd red
git remote add upstream https://github.com/redmatrix/redmatrix


From now on, you can pull upstream changes with the command
git fetch upstream

Before your changes can be merged automatically, you will often need to merge upstream changes.


git merge upstream/master


You should always merge upstream before pushing any changes, and must merge upstream with any pull requests to make them automatically mergeable.

99% of the time, this will all go well.  The only time it won't is if somebody else has been editing the same files as you - and often, only if they have been editing the same lines of the same files.  If that happens, that would be a good time to request help until you get the hang of handling your own merge conflicts.

Then you just need to add your changes git add view/theme/redexample/

This will add all the files in view/theme/redexample and any subdirectories.  If your particular files are mixed throughout the code, you should add one at a time.  Try not to do git add -a, as this will add everything, including temporary files (we mostly, but not always catch those with a .gitignore) and any local changes you have, but did not intend to commit.

Once you have added all the files you have changed, you need to commit them.  git commit

This will open up an editor where you can describe the changes you have made.  Save this file, and exit the editor.

Finally, push the changes to your own git
git push

And that's it, your repo is up to date!

All you need to do now is actually create the pull request.  There are two ways to do this.

The easy way, if you're using Github is to simply click the green button at the top of your own copy of the repository, enter a description of the changes, and click 'create pull request'.  The
main repository, themes, and addons all have their main branch at Github, so this method can be used most of the time.

Most people can stop here.

Some projects in the extended RedMatrix ecosphere have no Github presence, to pull request these is a bit different - you'll have to create your pull request manually.  Fortunately, this isn't
much harder.

git request-pull -p <start> <url>

Start is the name of a commit to start at.  This must exist upstream.  Normally, you just want master.

URL is the URL of your repo.

One can also specify <end>.  This defaults to HEAD.

Example:

git request-pull master https://example.com/project


And simply send the output to the project maintainer.

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