Whether you're trying to give back to the open source community or collaborating on your own projects, knowing how to properly fork and generate pull requests is essential. Unfortunately, when I started going through the process of forking and issuing pull requests, I had a decent amount of trouble. I found a lot of the information on GitHub and around the internet to be rather piecemeal and incomplete - part of the process described here, another there, common hangups in a different place, and so on.
In an attempt to coallate this information for myself and others, this short tutorial is what I've found to be fairly standard procedure for creating a fork, doing your work, issuing pull requests, and merging that pull request back into the original project.
Just head over to the GitHub page and click the "Fork" button. It's just that simple. Once you've done that, you can use your favorite Git client to clone your repo or just head straight to the command line:
$ git clone [email protected]:USERNAME/FORKED-PROJECT.gitWhile this isn't an absolutely necessary step, if you plan on doing anything more than just a tiny quick fix, you'll want to make sure you keep your fork up to date by tracking the original "upstream" repo that you forked.