So you're elated that someone else has already solved a large measure of the problem that you're grappling with in your website or app by posting their code on Github. And now that you've pulled their widget into your system you have identified some improvements that could be made.

Pull Requests

So now you're ready to make your first "Pull Request" and give back. You want everyone to benefit from the bug fix or new feature you've come up with for this widget.

And just as importantly, you'd like to stay up-to-date with everyone else's improvements to the source code repository as well.

Getting the Latest Upstream Changes

To do this, make sure that you have added an upstream remote to your fork. The command for that is:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/REPO/REPO.git  

Now whenever you want the latest changes added to your local branch just run these two commands:

# Fetch any new changes
git fetch upstream

# Merge any changes fetched into your working files
git merge upstream/master