GitHub contribution workflow for major changes

Last update: March 10, 2023

Overview

This workflow is suitable for a contributor who needs to make a major change or will be a frequent contributor to a repository. Frequent contributors typically have ongoing (long-running) changes, which go through multiple build/validation/staging cycles or span multiple days before pull request sign-off and merge.

Terminology

Before you start, let’s review some of the Git/GitHub terms used in this workflow.

NameDescription
forkNormally used as a noun, when referring to a copy of a main GitHub repository. In practice, a fork is just another repository. But it’s special in the sense that GitHub maintains a two-way connection back to the main/parent repository. It’s sometimes used as a verb, as in “You must fork the repository first.”
remoteA named connection to a remote repository, such as the “origin” or “upstream” remote. Git refers to these as remotes because they are used to reference a repository that’s hosted on another computer. In this workflow, a remote is always a GitHub repository.
originThe name assigned to the connection between your local repository and the repository from which it was cloned. In this workflow, origin represents the connection to your fork. It’s sometimes used as a moniker for the origin repository itself, as in “Remember to push your changes to origin.”
upstreamLike the origin remote, upstream is a named connection to another repository. In this workflow, upstream represents the connection between your local repository and the main repository, from which your fork was created. It’s sometimes used as a moniker for the upstream repository itself, as in “Remember to pull the changes from upstream.”

If you are unfamiliar with Git and GitHub concepts such as a repository or branch, please first review Git and GitHub fundamentals.

Workflow

IMPORTANT
If you haven’t already, you must complete the steps in the Setup section.

In this workflow, changes flow in a repetitive cycle. Starting from your device’s local repository, they flow back up to your GitHub fork, into the main GitHub repository, and back down locally again as you incorporate changes from other contributors.

Use GitHub flow

Recall from Git and GitHub fundamentals that a Git repository contains a main branch, plus any additional work-in-progress branches that have not been integrated into main. Whenever you introduce a set of logically related changes, it’s a best practice to create a working branch to manage your changes through the workflow. We refer to it here as a working branch because it’s a workspace to iterate/refine changes, until they can be integrated back into the main branch.

Isolating related changes to a specific branch allows you to control and introduce those changes independently, targeting them to a specific release time in the publishing cycle. In reality, depending on the type of work you do, you can easily end up with several working branches in your repository. It’s not uncommon to be working on multiple branches at the same time, each representing a different project.

NOTE
Making your changes in the main branch is not a good practice. Imagine that you use the main branch to introduce a set of changes for a timed feature release. You finish the changes and are waiting to release them. Then in the interim, you have an urgent request to fix something, so you make the change to a file in the main branch and then publish the change. In this example, you inadvertently publish both the fix and the changes that you were holding for release on a specific date.

The next step is to create a new working branch in your local repository, to capture your proposed changes. Each git client is different, so consult the help for your preferred client. You can see an overview of the process in the GitHub Guide on GitHub flow.