In this chapter we’ll start by looking at how to collaborate on a repository that you don’t have permission to push to by creating a fork and a pull request. While forks are a good way to accept contributions from people you don’t work with regularly, they are a bit too cumbersome for everyday use in a team that is working together closely. Because of this, later in the chapter we’ll look at how to collaborate directly on a single repository without using forks. Lastly, we’ll take some time to look more deeply into collaborating using pull requests and issues.
Contributing via a Fork
If you want to contribute directly to a repository, you either need to own it or have been added to it as a collaborator. If you want to contribute to a repository that you don’t own and are not a collaborator on, you’ll need to make a copy of it on GitHub under your user account. That process is called forking. Once you’ve forked a repository, you’ll be able to make any changes you want to your fork (copy) and you’ll be able to request that your changes get incorporated into the original repository by using a pull request. Let’s go through that process now.
When you click the Fork button, if you are a member ...
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