Contributing.md

Working by Forking

Just head over to the GitHub page and click the "Fork" button. It's just that simple. Once you've done that, you can use your favorite git client to clone your repo or just head straight to the command line:

Clone your fork to your local machine

git clone [email protected]:<USERNAME>/<FORKED-PROJECT-Name>.git

Keeping Your Fork Up to Date While this isn't a necessary step, if you plan on doing anything more than a tiny quick fix, you'll want to make sure you keep your fork up to date by tracking the original "upstream" repo that you forked earlier. To do this, you'll need to add a remote:

Add 'upstream' repo to list of remotes

git remote add upstream https://github.com/pbdsce/advaith-website.git

Verify the new remote named 'upstream'

git remote -v

Whenever you want to update your fork with the latest upstream changes, you'll need to first fetch the upstream repo's branches and latest commits to bring them into your repository:

Fetch from upstream remote

git fetch upstream

View all branches, including those from upstream

git branch -va

Now, checkout your main branch and merge the upstream repo's main branch:

Checkout your main branch and merge upstream

git checkout main
git merge upstream/main

If there are no unique commits on the local main branch, git will simply perform a fast-forward. However, if you have been making changes on main (in the vast majority of cases you probably shouldn't be - see the next section, you may have to deal with conflicts. When doing so, be careful to respect the changes made upstream.

Now, your local main branch is up-to-date with everything modified upstream.

Create a Branch (doing your work) Whenever you begin work on a new feature or bugfix, it's important that you create a new branch. Not only is it proper git workflow, but it also keeps your changes organized and separated from the main branch so that you can easily submit and manage multiple pull requests for every task you complete.

To create a new branch and start working on it, perform the following flow.

Check out the main branch - you want your new branch to come from the main

git checkout main

Create a new branch (give your branch its own simple informative name)

For enhancements use feature/your_username/issue# or feature/your_username/name_of_feature

For bugs use bug/your_username/issue# or bug/your_username/name_of_bug

git switch -c feature/jdoe/567

Switch to your new branch

git checkout feature/jdoe/567

Now, go to town hacking away and making whatever changes you want to.

Submitting your changes (a Pull Request)

Before submitting your pull request, you might want to do a few things to clean up your branch and make it as simple as possible for the original repo's maintainer to test, accept, and merge your work.

In the time that you've been working on your changes, if any commits have been made to the upstream main branch, you will need to rebase your development branch so that merging it will be a simple fast-forward that won't require any conflict resolution work.

Fetch upstream main and merge with your repo's main branch

git fetch upstream
git checkout main
git merge upstream/main

Signing-off on Commits (Developer Certificate of Origin)

To contribute to this project, you must agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) for each commit you make. The DCO is a simple statement that you, as a contributor, have the legal right to make the contribution.

See the DCO file for the full text of what you must agree to and how it works here. To signify that you agree to the DCO for contributions, you simply add a line to each of your git commit messages:

Signed-off-by: Jane Smith <[email protected]>

In most cases, you can add this signoff to your commit automatically with the -s or --signoff flag to git commit. You must use your real name and a reachable email address (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions). An example of signing off on a commit:

$ git commit -s -m “my commit message w/signoff”

To ensure all your commits are signed, you may choose to add this alias to your global .gitconfig:

~/.gitconfig

[alias]
  amend = commit -s --amend
  cm = commit -s -m
  commit = commit -s

Or you may configure your IDE, for example, Visual Studio Code to automatically sign-off commits for you:

If there were any new commits, rebase your development branch

git checkout feature/jdoe/567
git rebase main

Now, it may be desirable to squash some of your smaller commits down into a small number of larger more cohesive commits. You can do this with an interactive rebase:

Rebase all commits on your development branch

git checkout
git rebase -i main

This will open up a text editor where you can specify which commits to squash.

Submitting

Once you've committed and pushed all of your changes to GitHub, go to the page for your fork on GitHub, select your development branch, and click the pull request button. If you need to make any adjustments to your pull request, just push the updates to GitHub. Your pull request will automatically track the changes in your development branch and update it.

Thanks to Meshery for the base gitflow.