How I Do Pull Requests

I've been working with a couple new developers lately and we've been talking about how we actually write, review and check in code. Early on, we all agreed that we would use a shared repository and pull requests. That way we get good peer code reviews, and we can look at each other's work in progress code.

Great!

One of the developers approached me after that conversation and said, "umm, so how exactly do I do pull requests?" On Github, here's how I do it:


# CD into the project
$ cd Documents/project/project_repo/

# Check what branch I'm on (almost always should be master when I'm starting a new feature)
$ git branch
* master

# Pull to make sure I have the latest
$ git pull
Already up-to-date.

# Make a new branch off master. This will be my feature branch and can be named whatever I want. I prefix all my feature branches with cmp_ so people know who did most of the coding on it.
$ git branch cmp_NEWFEATURE

# Switch to my new branch
$ git checkout cmp_NEWFEATURE
Switched to branch 'cmp_NEWFEATURE'

#####
# DEVELOP.
# Commit my changes because they're awesome
# Develop more stuff. Make changes, etc.
# Commit my changes, because they're awesome.
# Pull from master and merge to make sure my stuff still works.
# NOW I'm ready to make a pull request.
#####

# push my branch to origin
$ git push origin cmp_NEWFEATURE

# Create the pull request
# I do this on github. See https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests
# Set the base branch to master and the head branch to cmp_NEWFEATURE

# Twiddle my thumbs waiting for the pull request to be approved.
# When it's approved, huzzah!

# If the reviewer said, "go ahead and merge", then the merge is on me to do.

# Check out the master branch. This is what I'll be merging into
$ git checkout master

# Merge from my pull request branch into master. I use --squash so the whole merge is one commit, no matter how many commits it took on the branch to get there.
$ git merge --squash cmp_NEWFEATURE

# If the merge isn't clean, go ahead and fix and commit.

# Push my newly-merged master up to origin. The pull request is done!
$ git push

# Go into github and close the pull request. I do this in a browser.

# Delete the feature branch from origin. Tidiness is awesome.
$ git push origin :

# Delete my local copy of the feature branch.
$ git branch -D


More information can be found here: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests.

Happy pulling!