Contributing With Git

A large number of contributors strongly prefer working with GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/.. Since MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. projects are stored in SubversionSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/. and mirrored to Git, you can use either one to contribute.

The following workflow uses ticket #986 and the WordPress.tv theme as an example, but the same steps can be applied to anything in the Meta repository.

If you get stuck with anything, you can find lots of information by searching the Web, and if that fails, you can always ask for help in the #meta channel on Slack.

The Meta Environment will automatically provision many of the Meta sites for you, and uses Git whenever possible.

If you’d prefer, though, you can also manually setup individual sites or plugins/themes into your existing development environment. To do that, first you’ll need to setup a new WordPress installation the way that you normally would inside your local development environment. Once that’s done, we’ll clone the entire Meta repository, and replace the default wp-content folder with WordPress.tv’s content folder.

git clone git://meta.git.wordpress.org/ /srv/www/wordpress-meta
git -C /srv/www/wordpress-meta config diff.noprefix true

cd /srv/www/wordpress.tv/public_html
rm -rf wp-content
ln -rs "/srv/www/wordpress-meta/wordpress.tv/public_html/wp-content/" wp-content

Before you start on a new ticket, make sure you’re working with the latest code by calling git pull on the trunk branch. Then, start your work on a new branch and commit your changes to that branch.

It’s important to keep the trunk branch clean, and only make changes on a separate branch. You should keep separate branches for each ticket you work on.

cd wp-content
git checkout trunk
git pull
git checkout -b 986

Now you can make your changes. When you’re done, commit them:

git commit

If you’re working on a non-trivial change, it may take several days or weeks to finish. Just make sure you keep the trunk branch updated, and frequently merge it into your working branch, so that you’re always working with the latest code.

Start by committing any changes you’ve made to your branch, then update trunk and merge it into your branch.

git commit

git checkout trunk
git pull

git checkout 986
git merge trunk

Now you can make your changes. When you’re done, commit them:

git commit

Note: For WordCamp.org, you can also send pull requests on GitHub.

The Meta team uses Trac to manage issues rather than a Git-aware platform like GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/, so instead of sending pull requests, you’ll upload a patch to TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/..

When you’ve committed all your changes and you’re ready to submit your work, update the trunk branch one last time, and merge any changes to your branch. Then, generate a diff with the –no-ext-diff option, to avoid any conflicts with external diff clients.

git checkout trunk
git pull

git checkout 986
git merge trunk
git diff --no-ext-diff trunk > 986.diff

Now that you’ve created 986.diff, you can upload it to the ticket on Meta trac.

Sometimes you’re collaborating with other contributors, and you want to build off of work that they’ve done. If they’ve uploaded a patch to Trac, you can apply it to your local copy with the patch command.

patch comes bundled with OS X and most Linux distributions, and is available for Windows as part of Cygwin.

You’ll want to use a fresh branch, because the patch will contain all of the changes against the original code; if you tried to apply it to a branch that you had an earlier version of the patch, you would have to resolve merge conflicts.

It’s best to start in whatever directory the patch was created in, so that the file paths line up. To determine where the file was created, you can examine the paths in the file. If the paths don’t match up, patch will prompt you to enter the path to the file that should be patched.

git checkout trunk
git pull

git checkout -b 986.2
patch -p0 < 986.2.diff

Last updated: January 31, 2023