Gitting Started with Rails

Nice title, right? Original. And hilarious.

So Rails is officially on GitHub. This is great if you’re a contributor: No more tracking unofficial repositiories (or maintaining your own), keeping backlogs of patches, or any of the million other frustrations that come along with not having the keys to the kingdom. Get over there, fork Rails, and integrate your awesome feature hotness!

Here’s how I’m tracking the Rails repository:

First, I forked rails/rails on GitHub. No GitHub account? They’re out of beta, you know.

git clone git@github.com:yournick/rails.git

git remote add upstream git://github.com/rails/rails.git

git fetch upstream

git checkout -b upstream upstream/master

Now I have my own forked master, from which I can branch features as I work on ‘em, plus I have an upstream branch, which tracks the Almighty Official Rails Tree. I can pull on the upstream branch and easily merge it into my forked master.

One quick note: I have branch.autosetupmerge set in my global configuration, which means that my upstream branch will automatically track changes. A little Google work should tell you whether you need to add --track to your incantations.

Have a different method for tracking? Think this is dumb? Hit the comments. I’ll update this article if a generally acclaimed Better Way emerges.