Stage 6 · Lesson 3 of 8

GitHub flow

is the simple way of working most teams use. The is always ready to release. For each change, you create a branch, commit your work and push it.

Then you open a , get a review and wait for the automatic checks to pass. Finally you and delete the branch. Short-lived branches mean small reviews and few conflicts.

Keep your branch up to date with main while you work. Some teams use more complex models with separate release branches, but start here.

Common trapa branch that lives for weeks, collects unrelated changes and turns into a review nobody wants to read.

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