If you’ve been looking to get into contributing your skills and ideas to the open-source community, this guide should be able to help you out. The first step is finding a project you want to contribute to on GitHub. You can be a part of any project you see on the site. Take a look at projects’ Issues page to see what bugs you might be able to fix or what features you may be able to add.

These instructions are for Linux. They assume you already have Git installed. If you don’t, try sudo apt-get install git. More instructions can be found in the Git documentation on Installing Git.

Forking and Cloning the Project

You will only have to complete this section once for every project you want to contribute to.

1. In your web browser, visit the project’s repository on http://github.com

2. Click the Fork button. This creates a copy of the repository on your account.

3. At a terminal, run git clone https://github.com/username/reponame.git where username is your GitHub username and reponame is the name of the repository you forked.

4. Change directory into the project directory with cd reponame

5. Run git remote add upstream https://github.com/username/reponame.gitWhere username is the original project owner’s username and reponame is once again the name of the repository.

Note: We’re using upstream as the remote’s name here, but you can use anything you want.

Working on the Code Locally

Follow these steps any time you want to make changes to the code, such as fixing a bug or adding a feature.

1. Pull the latest commits before working: git pull upstream master. This step is important to make sure you’re working with the latest code from the original project.

2. Run tests if they exist. Follow project instructions for this; They can usually be found in the project’s README file

3. Checkout the latest commits from your forked project: git pull origin master. This step is important to make sure you’re working with the latest code from your forked project.

4. Create a new branch (or switch to branch if it already exists): git checkout -b branchname Where branchname is a name to indicate what you’ll be working on. For example: bug_1234

5. Make your changes. Open/create source files; Save changes

6. If the project uses them, add unit tests and make sure all tests pass. Again, follow project instructions.

7. Stage files for tracking by running git add filenamewhere filename is the name of a file you’ve changed.

8. Repeat step 7 for all changed files. Use git status to see all changed files.

9. Commit changes to local repository by running git commit -m “Brief description of changes”

Pushing Changes to GitHub and Requesting a Pull

When you’re done working locally and ready to push online for others to use, follow the steps below. It’s worth mentioning one more time to make sure all tests pass. I strongly discourage pushing code where any tests fail.

1. Push branch to your repository on GitHub by running git push origin -u branchname Where branchname is the name you chose earlier

2. Visit your forked project on http://github.com

3. Select the branch you’ve been working on from the Branch dropdown menu

4. Click the New pull request button

5. Write a Title and Comment describing the changes in detail.

6. Click the Create pull request button

This post first appeared on my old blog on April 9, 2012. It was last updated October 26, 2018.