A Practical Git Workflow

This walks through the complete day-to-day loop for contributing to a repository: cloning it, working on a branch, committing, pushing, opening a pull request, and staying in sync with everyone else's changes. It's the same handful of commands used for nearly every change, so it's worth having down as muscle memory rather than looking it up each time.

Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/username/repository-name.git
cd repository-name

Create a New Branch

Work on a separate branch instead of editing main directly — it keeps changes organized and means main is never in a half-finished state.

git checkout -b your-branch-name

git checkout -b new-branch   # example

Make Your Edits

Open the project in an editor and make the changes:

nvim .

Stage and Commit

Stage everything that changed:

git add .

Commit with a message that says why, not just what:

git commit -m "Describe what you changed"

Push the Branch

git push origin new-branch

Open a Pull Request

1. Go to the repository page on GitHub.
2. GitHub shows a banner for the branch just pushed, with a Compare & pull request button.
3. Click it, review the diff, add a title and description, and submit.
4. Once approved, merge it.

Alternative (not recommended for teams): with direct write access it's possible to push straight to main, but branches + pull requests catch mistakes before they land and give reviewers something concrete to comment on.

Keep the Local Repo in Sync

Once other people's work lands on main, pull it before starting anything new to avoid unnecessary conflicts:

git checkout main
git pull origin main