Making a pull request

Once you’ve written some CKAN code or documentation, you can submit it for review and merge into the central CKAN git repository by making a pull request. This section will walk you through the steps for making a pull request.

1. Create a git branch

   Each logically separate piece of work (e.g. a new feature, a bug fix, a new docs page, or a set of improvements to a docs page) should be developed on its own branch forked from the master branch.

   The name of the branch should include the issue number (if this work has an issue in the CKAN issue tracker), and a brief one-line synopsis of the work, for example:

   2298-add-sort-by-controls-to-search-page
   

2. Fork CKAN on GitHub

   Sign up for a free account on GitHub and fork CKAN, so that you have somewhere to publish your work.

   Add your CKAN fork to your local CKAN git repo as a git remote. Replace USERNAME with your GitHub username:

   git remote add my_fork https://github.com/USERNAME/ckan
   

3. Commit and push your changes

   Commit your changes on your feature branch, and push your branch to GitHub. For example, make sure you’re currently on your feature branch then run these commands:

   git add doc/my_new_feature.rst
   git commit -m "Add docs for my new feature"
   git push my_fork my_branch
   

   When writing your git commit messages, try to follow the Writing commit messages guidelines.

4. Send a pull request

   Once your work on a branch is complete and is ready to be merged into the master branch, create a pull request on GitHub. A member of the CKAN team will review your work and provide feedback on the pull request page. The reviewer may ask you to make some changes. Once your pull request has passed the review, the reviewer will merge your code into the master branch and it will become part of CKAN!

   When submitting a pull request:

   • Your branch should contain one logically separate piece of work, and not any unrelated changes.

   • You should have good commit messages, see Writing commit messages.

   • Your branch should contain new or changed tests for any new or changed code, and all the CKAN tests should pass on your branch, see Testing CKAN.

   • Your pull request shouldn’t lower our test coverage. You can check it at our coveralls page <https://coveralls.io/r/ckan/ckan>. If for some reason you can’t avoid lowering it, explain why on the pull request.

   • Your branch should contain new or updated documentation for any new or updated code, see Writing documentation.

   • Your branch should be up to date with the master branch of the central CKAN repo, so pull the central master branch into your feature branch before submitting your pull request.

     For long-running feature branches, it’s a good idea to pull master into the feature branch periodically so that the two branches don’t diverge too much.