COSIMA Hackathon 2025: Forking Repositories, Making Pull Requests

List of Contributors

• Boaty McBoatface, 18th August 2025

This repository is an introduction to forking a repository in order to make a pull request

For GitHub repositories you didn't create yourself¹, the default way to contribute is:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch.
3. Push some changes to that branch.
4. Create a pull request.

In this repository, we're going to walk through a pared down example of what that looks like.

For repositories you do have write access to (if you don't know what that means don't worry!), the process is very similar, except you won't need to create a fork.

For each section, just follow the link, and the instructions will walk you through each step. Each section has a link to the next section at the bottom, so you can easily navigate through the process.

---

Forking the repository

1: Forking the repository.

Creating a new branch

2: Creating a new branch.

Pushing changes

3: Pushing changes.

Creating a Pull Request

4: Creating a Pull Request.

---

Pushing changes to Jupyter notebooks

Bonus: Pushing changes to Jupyter notebooks.

Footnotes

1. Technically, repositories for which you don't have write access, although in practice these generally overlap. ↩