#117: Let’s Attempt To Do a “Pull Request”

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

I’ve never in my life submitted a “Pull Request” on GitHub. I wanted to give it a shot, so this video is capturing the moment of me attempting to figure it out. Fair warning, this isn’t a succinct, quick tutorial. This is me thinking to myself and struggling through it all.

My idea was that I wanted to put FitVids.js onto cdnjs so people can link it up through there. Their process for doing that is by forking their GitHub repo, follow their instructions for adding a new library, and submit a pull request.

So we do it!

Things I struggled with:

  • I didn’t understand if a pull request was a “Git” thing or a “GitHub” thing. I’m still not 100% sure but it seems like it’s a GitHub thing, as we did it 100% through GitHub.com.
  • I didn’t understand what exactly composes a “pull request” – I thought it would be more like you move a specific commit over to another repo. We learned that it’s actually the entire repo that you move together (all commits made since your fork).
  • One of their requirements was that it pass the “npm test” thing locally. It didn’t seem to pass that even with an unchanged fork of the repo. Ultimately I did screw up the first pull request also with an incorrect file name. This failed the “Travis build” on GitHub.com, which I also don’t understand (is it the same as the npm test?), but after fixing the file name the second request worked.

As a follow up, the owners of the cdnjs repo asked that I include the non-minified version in the repo and add a “tag” to the FitVids repo with the correct versions. So I had to learn another brand new thing, but ultimately got it done.

The Pull Request