It's hard. It's always hard the first time you do something. Especially when you are collaborating, making mistakes isn't a comfortable thing. We wanted to simplify the way new open-source contributors learn & contribute for the first time.
Reading articles & watching tutorials can help, but what's better than actually doing the stuff in a practice environment? This guide aims at simplifying the way beginners make their first contribution. If you are looking to make your first contribution, follow the steps below.
If you don't have git on your machine, install it.
Fork this repository by clicking on the fork button on the top of this page. This will create a copy of this repository in your account.
Now clone the forked repository to your machine. Go to your GitHub account, open the forked repository, click on the code button and then click the copy to clipboard icon.
Open a terminal and run the following git command:
git clone "url you just copied"
where "url you just copied" (without the quotation marks) is the url to this repository (your fork of this project). See the previous steps to obtain the url.
For example:
git clone https://github.com/this-is-you/first-contributions.git
where this-is-you is your GitHub username. Here you're copying the contents of the first-contributions repository on GitHub to your computer.
Change to the repository directory on your computer (if you are not already there):
cd AfriLang
Now create a branch using the git checkout command:
git checkout -b your-new-branch-name
For example:
git checkout -b feat-login-page
(The name of the branch does not need to have the word feat in it, but it's a reasonable thing to include because the purpose of this branch is to add a feature called login to the project.)
Your name will now be part of the Contributors
If you go to the project directory and execute the command git status, you'll see there are changes.
Add those changes to the branch you just created using the git add command:
git add NAME_OF_FILE
"to add a specific file"
git add .
"to add all files automatically ----notice the dot ( . )"
Now commit those changes using the git commit command:
git commit -m "add loging page"
the commit message should be in respect to what you are commiting
Push your changes using the command git push:
git push origin <add-your-branch-name>
replacing <add-your-branch-name> with the name of the branch you created earlier.
If you go to your repository on GitHub, you'll see a Compare & pull request button. Click on that button.
Now submit the pull request.
Soon the project maintainers will be merging all your changes into the master branch of this project. You will get a notification email once the changes have been merged.
Happy Contributing ❤️