Pull Requests

The basic steps for creating a pull request are explained in CONTRIBUTING.md. This page helps you with the more difficult parts of pull requests.

Merging from master

If a pull request stays open for a while, often other people submit changes to touch the same file, so you need to merge in those changes.

git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master master
git push
git checkout your-branch
git merge master
git push --set-upstream origin your-branch

Squashing commits

Sometimes you add further commits to your pull request in order to apply the recommendations of the code review. To do this:

1 (optional) merge from master (see Merging from master above) 1 squash commits in your local repository 1 push your changes to your GitHub remote repository

Details of step two and three are below.

Squashing commits locally

If you have not merged from master, you can simply use git rebase to squash commits:

git checkout your-branch
git rebase -i master

See this blog page for more details on how to use git rebase -i

If you have merged from master (or you are not sure whether you have merged from master) it is safer to to create a new branch and reapply the changes there:

git checkout your-branch
git merge master
git branch -m your-branch your-branch-orig
git checkout -b your-branch master
git read-tree -u -m your-branch-orig
git commit

Give the commit message a good message for the overall commit.

Updating your GitHub remote

After squashing commits in your local repository, your git graph is now incompatible with the remote on GitHub. Therefore you must use the force flag for pushing.

git push --force --set-upstream origin your-branch