Last updated by pledbrook 1 year ago
One of the benefits of GitHub is the way that you can easily contribute to a project by forking the repository and sending pull requests with your changes.

What follows are some guidelines to help ensure that your pull requests are speedily dealt with and provide the information we need. They will also make your life easier!

Create a local branch for your changes

Your life will be greatly simplified if you create a local branch to make your changes on. For example, as soon as you fork a repository and clone the fork locally, execute 

git checkout -b mine
This will create a new local branch called "mine" based off the "master" branch. Of course, you can name the branch whatever you like - you don't have to use "mine".

Create JIRAs for non-trivial changes

For any non-trivial changes, raise a JIRA issue if one doesn't already exist. That helps us keep track of what changes go into each new version of Grails.

Include JIRA issue ID in commit messages

This may not seem particularly important, but having a JIRA issue ID in a commit message means that we can find out at a later date why a change was made. Include the ID in any and all commits that relate to that issue. If a commit isn't related to an issue, then there's no need to include an issue ID.

Make sure your fork is up to date

Since the core developers must merge your commits into the main repository, it makes life much easier if your fork on GitHub is up to date before you send a pull request.

Let's say you have the main repository set up as a remote called "upstream" and you want to submit a pull request. Also, all your changes are currently on the local "mine" branch but not on "master". The first step involves pulling any changes from the main repository that have been added since you last fetched and merged: 

git checkout master
git pull upstream
This should complete without any problems or conflicts. Next, rebase your local branch against the now up-to-date master: 
git checkout mine
git rebase master
What this does is rearrange the commits such that all of your changes come after the most recent one in master. Think adding some cards to the top of a deck rather than shuffling them into the pack.

You'll now be able to do a clean merge from your local branch to master: 

git checkout master
git merge mine
Finally, you must push your changes to your remote repository on GitHub, otherwise the core developers won't be able to pick them up: 
git push
You're now ready to send the pull request from the GitHub user interface.

Say what your pull request is for

A pull request can contain any number of commits and it may be related to any number of issues. In the pull request message, please specify the IDs of all issues that the request relates to. Also give a brief description of the work you have done, such as: "I refactored the data binder and added support for custom number editors (GRAILS-xxxx)".