20180809 Adding Commits to an Incoming PR

One of my projects starting getting some PRs recently - I learned how to add their branches as remotely, and add and push commits to them.

The PR

I am working on a project called Vue Testing Handbook. You can view it at here. Recently this PR was made. Sometimes I like to do some minor formatting before merging.

Adding as a Remote

The first thing I need to do if I want to add some commits to this PR is add the other user’s repository as a remote. His repository url is https://github.com/superyusuke/vue-testing-handbook.git. I can add it under any name I like. I’ll use yusuke. So, to add the repo I can run

git remote add yusuke https://github.com/superyusuke/vue-testing-handbook.git

I can view a list of my remote repositories by running git remote. I get the following:

alex
fork
origin
yusuke

Looks like it’s working. I can actually fetch all his branches using git fetch yusuke.

Checking Out the Branch

Next I want to check his branch out. I will make a new branch, forked from his. I can do this by running git checkout -b yusuke-vuex-update yusuke/japanese/testing-vuex. The output is Branch 'yusuke-vuex-update' set up to track remote branch 'japanese/testing-vuex' from 'yusuke'. This new branch is tracking the remote. This Stack Overflow explains it well. Simply put:

A ‘tracking branch’ in Git is a local branch that is connected to a remote branch. When you push and pull on that branch, it automatically pushes and pulls to the remote branch that it is connected with.

That means if I commit and push anything to my local yusuke-vuex-update, git knows which remote repo and branch to push to. In this case, that will be the branch that is making the PR against my repo.

Pushing to the Remote

After I made my changes locally on yusuke-vuex-update, I committed them and ran git push. I got the following message:

fatal: The upstream branch of your current branch does not match
the name of your current branch.  To push to the upstream branch
on the remote, use

    git push yusuke HEAD:japanese/testing-vuex

To push to the branch of the same name on the remote, use

    git push yusuke yusuke-vuex-update

To choose either option permanently, see push.default in 'git help config'.

I want my new commits to be on the same branch - that is, I want them to become the new HEAD. The second option would create a new branch, which is not what I want. So I run git push yusuke HEAD:japanese/testing-vuex. It works.

Conclusion

• You add a remote repo by typing git remote add [remote-name-to-use-locally] [remote-url]

• A full example is git remote add yusuke https://github.com/superyusuke/vue-testing-handbook.git

• Checkout a remote branch with git checkout -b [new-local-branch-name] [remote-name-to-use-locally]/[remote-branch]

• A full example is git checkout -b update-yusuke-testing-vuex yusuke/japanese/testing-vuex.

• This sets up a local branch which is tracking the remote

• When a local branch his tracking a remote branch, git knows which remote repoistory and branch to push any commits to

• To push to a remote from a tracking branch, you can run git push [remote-name-to-use-locally] HEAD:[remote-branch]

• Aa full example is git push yusuke HEAD:japanese/testing-vuex