Forking is the safe foundation
to contributing to any open source project.
(soft music)
Welcome to another episode of Git and GitHub Foundations on forking.
Forking is the act of taking your repository and copying it
under your own account.
Now this act of copying allows you to safely make changes
essentially in a sandbox.
This works both on the open source model
as well as an open company model,
greatly expanding the number of employees
that contribute to a project.
When we see a project that we'd like to contribute to,
we click the Fork button to make a copy of that into our own account
and then begin to make our own changes.
The appropriate step is to create a branch
on that forked copy
so that there's a name, label and container
for the potential contribution that we'll later make
to the original repo.
Once this is under your account
there's some metadata there that shows
who owns the original copy of this project and you can also see
who else has maybe forked this project as well.
The network graph supplements that with metadata down to the commit level
seeing what work people are doing in the repositories.
All of this is a preparatory step
for offering your changes back to the original project owner
through the mechanism of a Pull Request.
Thanks for watching another episode of Git and GitHub Foundations on forking.
As always, don't forget to click subscribe over on the side,
or leave us questions or comments down below,
or see some of these other educational videos
especially the one on Pull Requests.
(soft music) (voices silenced)