Question

I recently started managing a project on GitHub where people have been submitting pull requests. Rather than merge them to master, I would like the ability to:

1. First vet them to make sure they actually work

2. Possibly making some stylistic changes before merging to master

How can I do this?

Do you have to make a separate branch, such as “dev”, and instruct people to code against that before you merge to master?

Answer 1

There is a github help page on this which details how to make changes to a pull request by checking out pull requests locally.

What I might try is first creating a remote for the pull request submitter (I’m using the examples from the above page):

git remote add kneath git://github.com/kneath/jobs.git

Fetch the changes:

git fetch kneath

Check out the branch in question (ex. master):

git checkout kneath/master

Vet them however you like, since the code that will be there will be the pull request code. Run tests, etc.

Merge them in if you’re good to go:

git checkout master
git merge kneath/master

Further, here is a very good page on git project management workflows which details the various workflows one can take on collaboration integration.