newcomers.md

Newcomer Guide

In this document, I'll explain how to do some basic actions using git and GitHub. If something isn't clear, Google is your friend: search Google and ask on StackOverflow.

How to Submit a Pull Request

You should really be learning this from a tutorial dedicated to teaching you git and GitHub, but I would like the recommended practices here as well. For the purposes of this example, I'll assume you're fixing a typo in the README page.

First, you'll want to fork the repository. You can do this by clicking on the 'Fork' button at the top. This will create an identical copy of the project that you can write to.

Secondly, you want to clone your fork. The fork exists only in GitHub's servers. To make changes, you need to download the project to your local hard disk:

$ git clone https://github.com/<your username>/commento.git

After cloning the repository, you create a branch. This a pretty important step most people miss. Right after you clone and go into the directory, you're in the master branch of the project. This is essentially a default branch. You do not want to make changes over. To fix the README typo, create a new branch with:

$ git checkout -b readme_fix

This will create a new branch call readme_fix. Now you can make the changes with your favorite editor. When you're done it's time to commit and push your changes. To commit, do:

$ git commit -m "your commit message

See the section title Commit Guidelines to understand what makes a good commit. Anyway, now you just need to push your changes. To do this, run:

$ git push --set-upstream origin readme_fix

With that done, you'll have your changes pushed to GitHub's servers. Now all that's left is to create a pull request. To do this, go to the webpage of your fork. Click on "New pull request" and fill in the appropriate fields.