lennhy / github-pull-request-basics-v-000

#Github Pull Request Basics

##Objectives:

1. Understand what a pull request is
2. Identify how to create a pull request from one fork to another
3. Identify how to add commits to an existing pull request

##Overview: The concept of a pull request is unique to Github, meaning it does not exist outside of Github. Conceptually, it is a request for the owner of a receiving party (learn-co-students in the case of labs) to pull from you, because it would be rude to push your code onto someone else.

Let's go over a familiar example. Let's say you fork a repo from https://github.com/learn-co-students/awesome-lab. You now have a copy of that repo on your Github account here https://github.com/your-user-name/awesome-lab.

So you clone down that fork to your computer, make some changes and now you want to make a pull request back up to https://github.com/learn-co-students/awesome-lab.

Basically you are saying, "I have made these changes to the original repo, will you accept them?" You are requesting that learn-co-students take your changes and combine them into the original repo that you've forked. It's a way for you to work on someone else's code without breaking their codebase.

Pull requests are what power the open source community. Through this process, anyone can fork a repo, make changes and submit a pull request. Now instead of just the owner working on their codebase, anyone can work on it. Here is a great example of a pull request on the Ruby codebase.

###Pull Request From One Fork To Another

Let's say you fork repository https://github.com/learn-co-students/awesome-lab as https://github.com/your-user-name/awesome-lab. Then you make some changes to your newly forked repo. Another student forks the repository https://github.com/learn-co-students/awesome-lab as https://github.com/their-user-name/awesome-lab.

Now you make some changes and you want to send a pull request to their fork https://github.com/their-user-name/awesome-lab. How do you do this?

###Step 1 Navigate to your forks page, https://github.com/your-user-name/awesome-lab and click on pull requests in the top right corner.

###Step 2 Click on the green New Pull Request button.

###Step 3 Here you can choose the base fork, which will be their-user-name/awesome-lab. Then choose the head fork, which will be your-user-name/awesome-lab Now click Create pull request.

###Add Commits To An Existing Pull Request Let's say you make a pull request from https://github.com/your-user-name/awesome-lab to https://github.com/learn-co-students/awesome-lab. Then you notice you made a typo in your code. All you have to do is fix the typo, commit it and push up the changes to your branch. As long as the pull request already exists, the commits will be added automatically.

View Github Pull Request Basics on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.