Collaborate

Fetch another contributor’s branch

What happens when you would like to collaborate with another contributor and they have work-in-progress on their own fork of Zulip? No problem! Just add their fork as a remote and pull their changes.

$ git remote add <username> https://github.com/<username>/zulip.git
$ git fetch <username>

Now you can check out their branch just like you would any other. You can name the branch anything you want, but using both the username and branch name will help you keep things organized.

$ git checkout -b <username>/<branchname>

You can choose to rename the branch if you prefer:

git checkout -b <custombranchname> <username>/<branchname>

Check out a pull request locally

Just as you can check out any user’s branch locally, you can also check out any pull request locally. GitHub provides a special syntax (details) for this since pull requests are specific to GitHub rather than Git.

First, fetch and create a branch for the pull request, replacing ID and BRANCHNAME with the ID of the pull request and your desired branch name:

$ git fetch upstream pull/ID/head:BRANCHNAME

Now switch to the branch:

$ git checkout BRANCHNAME

Now you work on this branch as you would any other.

Note: you can use the scripts provided in the tools/ directory to fetch pull requests. You can read more about what they do here.

tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request <PR-number>
tools/fetch-pull-request <PR-number>