Configuring your git remotes

If you created your fork correctly and cloned it locally, running:

git remote -v

it should output something alike:

origin git@github.com:your_user_name/consul.git (fetch) origin git@github.com:your_user_name/consul.git (push)

Now we have to add CONSUL's github as upstream remote with:

git remote add upstream git@github.com:consul/consul.git

and to check everything is fine with

git remote -v

again you should get:

upstream git@github.com:consul/consul.git (fetch) upstream git@github.com:consul/consul.git (push) origin git@github.com:your_user_name/consul.git (fetch) origin git@github.com:your_user_name/consul.git (push)

Pulling changes from CONSUL

Start by creating a branch named upstream from your master branch to apply CONSUL changes:

git checkout master
git pull
git checkout -b upstream

Then we can fetch all changes from consul remote server with:

git fetch upstream

And then you can choose to either:

A. Get all the latest changes on CONSUL's master branch with git merge upstream/master

B. Just update up to an specific release tag (so you can do incremental updates if you're more than one release behind). For example to update up to v0.9 release just: git merge v0.9

Merging changes

After the previous section merge command, there are three possible outcomes:

A. You get a nice Already up-to-date. response. That means your fork is up to date with consul 😊👌

B. You get a screen on your git configured editor showing the commit message Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/master' into upstream. That means git was able to grab latest changes from CONSUL's master branch, and it can merge them without code change conflicts. Finish the commit.

C. You get some git errors along with a Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result. message. That means there are conflicts between the code changes you did and the ones done on CONSUL repository since the last time you update it. That's the main reason we strongly recommend often updates of your fork (think at least monthly). Resolve merge conflicts carefully and commit them.

Now you can just simply push your upstream branch to github and create a Pull Request so you can easily check all changes going into your repo, and see your tests suite runs.

Remember you can always quickly check changes that will come from CONSUL to your fork by replacing your_org_name on the url: https://github.com/your_org_name/consul/compare/master...consul:master​