Pull Requests

The basic steps for creating a pull request are explained in CONTRIBUTING.md. This page helps you with the more difficult parts of pull requests.

Squashing commits

Sometimes you add further commits to your pull request in order to apply the recommendations of the code review. Your commit log may look like this:

d9b90bc Add feature X
15c925c Apply code review
dc23211 Apply further code review

Usually we ask you for squashing the feature commit and the code review commits. It means that they merged into a single commit. This can be done using git rebase.

git rebase -i HEAD~3

Replace the number 3 with the number of commits you want to squash. If you don't know how many commits to squash, you can tell git to look at all commits you made on your branch since you branched off of master:

git rebase -i master

After executing either command git opens your editor with the following file:

pick d9b90bc Add feature X
pick 15c925c Apply code review
pick dc23211 Apply further code review

Change line 2 and 3 by replacing pick with squash.

pick d9b90bc Add feature X
squash 15c925c Apply code review
squash dc23211 Apply further code review

When you save this file, git squashes the commits and your commit log has now a single commit that consists of the changes of the three former commits.

e52a32c Add feature X

You may want to merge from master before re-pushing to github:

git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master master
git push
git checkout your-branch
git merge master
git rebase -i origin/master
git push --set-upstream origin your-branch

Your git graph is now incompatible with the remote on GitHub. Therefore you must use the force flag for pushing.

git push --force --set-upstream origin your-branch