Stage 6 · Lesson 4 of 8

Writing a good pull request

A (PR) asks for your to be merged, and it is where the discussion happens. A good one is small. Its title says what changes.

Its description covers why, what you did, how you tested it and anything reviewers should look at closely. Add screenshots for visual changes. Link the it closes by writing, for example, "Closes #42".

Read through your own changes on first; you will catch leftover debug code and typos. If you want early feedback, open a draft PR.

Common trapa 2,000-line pull request with the description "changes", which reviewers skim or leave unread.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it

Resources for this stage

Start with· follow one of these

BookFree
Pro Git
Scott Chacon and Ben Straub
Chapter 6 covers GitHub itself: forks, pull requests and maintaining a project
GuideFree
Contributing to a Project (GitHub Docs)
GitHub · Beginner
GitHub's own walkthrough of the fork, branch and pull request workflow

Practise

First Contributions
A safe repository built for making your first pull request to someone else's project

Keep handy

Connecting to GitHub with SSH (GitHub Docs)
Official steps for generating, adding and testing SSH keys on each operating system
GitHub CLI
The gh manual for pull requests, issues and CI from the terminal

Also worth your time

Conventional CommitsRead
A widely used commit message convention you will meet in many repositories
roadmap.sh: Git and GitHubGo deeper
The GitHub half of the map: Actions, projects, security features and more