Nowadays applying a fix to a project is as easy as creating a fork – which conjures up a full remote copy of the project for you to hack on – selecting the file you want to change, pressing Edit and committing your fixes. What if you are at the receiving end of a pull request (abbreviated PR in the following) instead? Using a polished web UI is great and often that’s all you need. Click a button to Approve, click a button to Merge and you’re done. But that’s not always the case! It’s a common occurrence to have to download the changes included in a pull request(PR) locally, run a few tests, see how they look in your IDE to make sense of what was done. The steps to download – more explicitly fetch and checkout – your colleague’s or contributor’s pull requests are conceptually simple but they become even easier if you know a couple of important details and tips. So let me guide you to a better understanding of the command line facilities git gives you to handle pull requests from the command line with ease. Before we start: enrich your shell prompt with branch name and status I am always surprised by how many people have a bare command prompt that doesn’t show the git branch they are on or whether they have modified/uncommitted files in their working directory. If you thought – Hey that’s me! – allow me to help you and blow your mind at the same time! Please do yourself a favor and install something like the awesome liquid prompt which will give you excellent annotations on the status of your git working directory (and will support any other VCS, too): (In the above screenshot you see my prompt alerting me that I am on branch newbranch and have added 5 lines to the files I track in my working directory and I have removed 0) Everyone working in the same repository If you work on the same repository with your team the process of checking out a pull request is very straight forward: just fetch and checkout the branch from which the pull request was created: Get all the branches that were published on your shared repository: 1git fetch origin Create a local branch that tracks the remote branch you’re interested in: 1git checkout -b PRJ-1234 origin/PRJ-1234 Now you can diff, merge, test your heart out of this: 123git diff master ./run-tests.sh When you’re happy just go back to the Web UI and provide feedback or Approve the change outright. Contributors working in their own forks The process changes a bit when some of the contributors work in separate forks. In this case you can fetch the remote branch where the contribution or feature was committed: Add the contributor’s remote first: 1git remote add jsmith http://bitbucket.org/jsmith/coolproject.git Collect all the latest updates from origin first, your main repository: 123git checkout master git fetch origin git merge master Get all the branches that […]
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