Leveraging the GitHub CLI During Hacktoberfest - Contributing

Recently coming out of beta, the GitHub CLI is a tool for interacting with GitHub directly from your terminal. A successor to hub, CLI provides commands for interacting with most of GitHub:

CORE COMMANDS
  gist:       Manage gists
  issue:      Manage issues
  pr:         Manage pull requests
  release:    Manage GitHub releases
  repo:       Create, clone, fork, and view repositories

During this year's Hacktoberfest, I found out how the tool excels in helping make contributions to open source projects.

Forking

With CLI, you can fork a repository directly from your terminal.

› gh repo fork cli/cli
- Forking cli/cli...
✓ Created fork tmr08c/cli
? Would you like to clone the fork? Yes
Cloning into 'cli'..

It will also offer to clone the repository for you, which sets your upstream and origin remotes to the original repository and your fork, respectively.

› git remote -v
origin	git@github.com:tmr08c/cli.git (fetch)
origin	git@github.com:tmr08c/cli.git (push)
upstream	git@github.com:cli/cli.git (fetch)
upstream	git@github.com:cli/cli.git (push)

Not only does this make it easy to get access to a repository's code, but it also sets you up to successfully contribute to the project.

Making Pull Requests

With CLI, your workflow is the same whether you open a Pull Request against a project you own or one you contribute to; you use gh pr create.

› gh pr create

Creating pull request for tmr08c:my-fake-pr-branch
  into trunk in cli/cli

When contributing to an open source project, this will create a Pull Request in the original project and point it to your fork's branch.

Conclusion

While fun and inspiring, contributing to open source can be scary at times; CLI helps reduce some of the anxiety around open source by providing an easy to use tool that sets you up for open source success by following best practices.