My workflow with pull requests from forks
As a long time open source maintainer, I occasionally have to modify pull requests made by contributors via forks. If a contributor needs help adding/fixing tests, or addressing linter errors, it is often simpler for me to modify a pull request by adding a commit to their branch. I like this workflow as I can help the contributor out, and give them the option to revise my changes as well. I push changes to contributor forks infrequently enough, that I usually have to look how to do it each time, which led this post being written.
The high-level workflow I want is:
- Get the contents of the pull request onto my machine.
- Make some changes.
- Push our modified branch back to the fork and update the pull request.
Thankfully, GitHub generates a branch-ref that fits this scenario perfectly. First, I check out the pull request branch locally:
- git fetch origin pull/17563/head:pull-17563
- git switch pull-17563
This will fetch a branch from the origin repository (pull/17563/head), and create a local branch (pull-17563). With our changes complete, I make a commit and then push the branch back to the contributors fork:
- git add remove $user git@github.com:$user/$repo
- git push $user pull-17563/$user-branch
Pushing branches to contributor forks does require that the contributor allowed ‘maintainers can make changes’ option, but it is on by default.
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