GitHub Collaboration Fork Method Working with a Team

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able to use the GitHub workflow to work well as a team.

GitHub collaboration workflow

You’ve now seen the collaboration workflow - let’s review it:

Do these things once

• Choose a GitHub Manager: The GitHub manager is responsible for merging changes back into the main codebase. This person typically has the most time available to contribute to a project.
• GitHub manager sets up a repo on GitHub: The GitHub manager creates a GitHub repository with a README.md file in it.
• Programmers fork: The programmers will fork the repository the GitHub manager just created so that everyone on the team has their own remote repository on GitHub.
• All team members clone their remote repositories: Each team member will clone their remote repository to their local machine.

Repeat these steps for every new feature

• Create a new branch: Each team member will create a new branch to work on a new feature or bug fix.
• Make changes: Write code! Build features, fix bugs, and so on.
• Add, commit, and push the branch to GitHub: Each team member will push their branch to their remote repo.
• Create a pull request: Each team member will create a pull request to merge their changes into the GitHub Manager’s remote repo.
• Review and merge: The GitHub manager will lead the team in reviewing all pull requests. Once the changes have been reviewed, the GitHub manager will merge them into the GitHub Manager’s remote repo.
• Programmers sync forks: Programmers will sync the main branch of their remote repos to the main branch of the GitHub Manager’s remote repo.
• Pull changes: Each team member will pull the changes from the main branch of their remote repo to their local repo after ensuring their remote fork is up to date.

🎓 You do

In your teams, follow the GitHub collaboration workflow. Complete the following tasks (read every step before you begin):

• Choose a GitHub manager and have them create a new repository on GitHub.
• Complete the steps above. Follow along with the lecture notes to help you complete the steps. Please do not attempt to do this from memory after only seeing it once; you will not have a fun time.
• When the team gets to the Make Changes step above, everyone should add a new file called team.md to the repository. On the first line of this file, add your name. (Every first line of team.md should be a different name.)
• Complete the flow above to push and merge your changes with a pull request.

At the end of this exercise, you should have a new file called team.md in the repository with everyone’s name in it.

Tip: use this command to view changes to a repo through time:

git log --decorate --all --graph --oneline