Fork
Your own copy of someone else's repository, which you can push to, then propose changes back from with a pull request.
Open-source contributions make strong portfolio evidence: real code, reviewed by strangers, in public. The workflow is the one you've learned, with one extra step, because you can't push to someone else's repository: you work on your own copy, a fork, and propose your changes back to the project's maintainers, the people who review changes and decide what gets merged. The original repository is called upstream, which is only a naming habit (Git doesn't care what you call a remote), but nearly every project's guide uses it.
Try it now
The one rule: never rebase a branch other people have pulled.
Learn it properly
Git for teams · Branches, pull requests, rebasing and how a three-way merge finds conflicts. About 40 minutes.
Other terms from the same lesson
- git bisect: A Git command that binary-searches history to find the commit that introduced a bug.
- maintainer: A person who looks after a project: they review contributions and decide what gets merged.
- merge conflict: When two branches changed the same lines differently, so Git can't combine them without a person deciding.
- pull request: A request to merge a branch, where the change is reviewed, discussed and checked before it joins the main branch.
- rebase: Replaying your commits on top of another branch, giving a straight history with new commit ids.
- three-way merge: Combining two branches by comparing each with their last shared commit, the merge base.
- trunk-based development: A workflow where everyone merges small, short-lived branches into one main branch that is always deployable.
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