Take Your First Step To Open Source Projects!

Many young students wish to be software developers in the future. But some may not have a clue on where to start. I faced the exact issue 5 months ago until I started contributing to open-source projects. “Contributing to open-source” may sound difficult but It’s really simple than you think.

In this blog post, I’ll be focusing on how to send a pull request using Git. Let’s say that you are willing to contribute to website development. You’ll only need basic knowledge on HTML5 and CSS3. When I say you need to know them, It doesn’t mean you have to know everything when you start.

We’ll move on with a story to make our tutorial easier. Let’s say there are two friends, Chandler and Joey. Chandler works as a marketing intern in a large multi-national co-operation. Joey recently graduated high-school and working as an actor. One day Chandler’s boss Doug asked Chandler to see him in his office. When Chandler moved through the door Doug said, “Hey Chandler!, Do you know anything about website development?”. Chandler panicked and said “yes” without even thinking. Then Doug replied “Very well then, there is a small typo in the website heading. Go and fix it!”

(Go fix it! Chandler)

Chandler came out of his office having no idea how to do it. But he remembered Joey maintained the high-school website for 2 years. He suddenly gave a call to Joey and asked him whether Joey can do it for him. But instead of doing it for him, Joey taught Chandler how to do it step by step. Chandler did exactly as Joey said and he was able to complete the job so easily.

First, you have to create a Github account. Find out the Repository you want to develop and fork it to your account.

(Click on the top-right corner “Fork” button)

Once you fork a repository to your account, you can play around with the code much as you want and yet it won’t affect the original code. Before the development, you have to install Git on your computer. If you are using Windows as your OS you can download Git Bash. If it’s Linux, open your terminal and type

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install git

Go to your forked repository and click on the green “Code” button and copy the link.

Once you install Git, Open your terminal and type

$ git clone https://github.com/Gimhan-minion/sef-site.git 
$ cd sef-site

You can open your project using any text editor and it may look similar to this.

Now you are free to add, delete, edit anything according to your requirement. Once you are done the next step is to create a branch add those files. Let’s say you fixed the typo in the index.html file.

git checkout -b fix-typo 
git add src/main/webapp/index.html
git commit -m "Fixing typo in index.html"

Now everything is saved and looks fine in your repository. The next step is to push the changes you made to the original repository.

git push origin fix-typo

Once you enter this you can go to the original repository and confirm your pull request. Congratulations! You just sent your first pull request.

One last thing before winding-up. If you want to contribute to more open-source projects join the SEF team. You can find out some new issues we made in our repositories. Thank you for reading and keep up :)