How to Contribute to Open Source Projects on GitHub.

A step-by-step guide for beginners.

Contributing to Open source projects is a good way to gain experience as a beginner. It also helps with networking because you can connect with the different people working on a project.

This article is a step by step guide on how you can contribute to open source projects on GitHub.

GitHub, according to the GitHub documents, is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. Version control, also known as source control, means to manage and track different changes or versions to a software code. This makes it easy to supervise alterations to original code.

Open source projects are projects that are made available for people to contribute, modify or enhance. These projects are developed by communities and usually have no restriction to the type of contributions.

GitHub hosts open source projects and makes it easy to search for projects that you might be interested in. Using GitHub for the first time can look complicated. This article breaks down the basic steps involved in using GitHub to contribute to open source projects.

The following list contains the steps involved:

Create and set up an account using your email address.

On the first contributions page, fork the repo to your account by clicking on the fork button. Forking allows you to make changes to the files without affecting the source file.

Click on the code button. Then click on the copy link button.

Open your terminal and run the following command:

git clone “the link you copied” (without the quotation marks)

This copies the repository to your local computer as a folder.

You need to create a branch where changes you make will be submitted under. Most repos are based on a public branch called master/main. For this repo, the base branch is master.

cd first-contributions

git branch “desired name of branch” (without the quotation marks)

git branch

git checkout “name of created branch” (without the quotation marks.)

You can edit the file/code now. In this instance, the edit is to add your name to the contributors list.

To check the difference between the edited file and original version, enter the command in the terminal:

git diff

git add “name of file edited” (without the quotation marks)

In this case:

git add Contributors.md

git commit -m “message title describing edit”

In this case:

git commit -m “add <your name> to contributors list”

git push origin <name of created branch>

On your GitHub repository, Click on the compare and pull request button.

You’re done. Wait for a reviewer to review and approve your pull request, as the case may be.

You have just contributed to a GitHub project.

According to official GitHub reports, as of November 2021, there are at least 28 million public repositories. This gives a range of projects to choose from, with relevance to you.

No contribution is small. Open Source projects appreciate any kind. The more you contribute, the more experience you gain.

Related posts:

The world has come a long way since apartheid rocked South Africa. A lot of things have improved in the world. Society are more incline to frown at any act of racism. People are more reasonable now…

Here we go day 2! On day one I found that I couldn’t just pick one anime so I decided for each of these questions I will be doing 5 for every topic. This is different from what I am used to blogging…

A resin trap screen or media trap screen is a simple, inexpensive protective sieve device that ensures the ion exchange resin or other filtration media does not leave the water treatment equipment…