A simple ‘how to’: forks and pull requests on the Hydro Community GitHub

The Hydro Community GitHub is a place where both developers and non-developers can suggest and brainstorm ideas for the Hydro project. This could be potential HCDP tasks, uploading marketing materials such as logos and infographics, or general suggestions on how the community can grow. As the community develops it is envisioned that even more interesting ways to get involved will arise, all of which will be influenced and built by the community as a whole.

As discussed in the announcement article the issue with GitHub is that all the talk of forks and pull requests can make the system appear too complicated for non developers. It may seem that way, and admittedly there are a lot of tricky aspects to GitHub, however if you just want to carry out a simple task, such as comment, suggest a change, or upload an image, the process is relatively straightforward.

This article will explain in the simplest terms, how to upload a file such as an image, correct a typo, or even suggest wholesale changes to a document.

Forks and pull requests

In the Hydro Community announcement we described how to make an account on GitHub and post an issue for discussion, we will therefore assume that you now have an account and, in this example, want to upload an image to the Hydro Community.

To do this, once logged into your account, you should first go to the relevant Hydro Community GitHub page, or repo (in this case we will use the Designs repo).

Once on this page click on Fork (circled in red below).

You will then see the following screen for a few seconds.

Once the forking has completed you will go back to a screen that looks like the one that you just left. It is an exact clone of the Hydro Community Designs repo, however if you look at the top left (circled green in the below image) you will see that it resides in your own account.

You can now click on the relevant folder where you want to upload your image (circled in red below).

Once in the folder you can click on Upload Files (circled in red below).

Uploading is simple you can Drag & Drop or search for your files, add whatever title and description you want and then press the green ‘Commit Changes’ button.

After Committing the changes you will be taken back to your Designs repo, you will however notice (circled in green below) that the repo now says that the branch is ‘1 commit ahead of HydroCommunity:Master’ this just means that your version of the repo has the file uploaded and the main Hydro Community version doesn’t.

To start the process asking for the Hydro Community version to be updated just click on ‘Pull request’ (circled in red below).

At this stage you will come to a ‘Comparing changes’ screen. If you are happy you can click on the green ‘Create pull request’ button.

On the next screen you will see that the pull request is going to send the changes from your fork to the main Hydro Community Designs repo. Add some details about your upload and click the green ‘Create pull request’ button.

In terms of your account, that’s it for now, a request has been sent to the Hydro Community and is awaiting review by one of the admin. To see it you can head back over the the Hydro Community Designs repo and click on pull requests (circled in red below).

There you can see a list of pull requests awaiting review.

If you click on one of them you can see any discussion and requests made by admin.

If the admin accepts the pull request it will be merged into the official Hydro Community account, however they may ask you to make changes. You will also get emails if there is any discussion takes place, or if the merge request is accepted.

Once merged you will be able to see your file or change merged into the official Hydro Community GitHub.

Although this is a basic ‘how to’ for uploading images , it will work with anything you see on GitHub. If you see a mistake in code, typo, grammatical error, or just want to suggest some wording then it is the same principle.

Any questions you can find us on the Hydrogen Discord https://discord.gg/9sUxux9 or Telegram https://t.me/projecthydro