Fetching and merging contributions

To be able to collaborate on a Radicle project, you need to know how to fetch and merge contributions from other people. To fetch and merge changes from a contributor, you first need to add them as a remote to your project. If you haven't done so, follow the instructions in Tracking & viewing contributions section.

If you can see a peer's changes after adding them as a remote, they have been successfully replicated to your machine. If you have added a peer as a remote and can't see their changes, head over to our FAQ section.

Fetching changes

If you're interested in merging these changes into one of your branches, you'll need to fetch these commits and merge them into your working copy. To make sure you can fetch and push changes, you need to add the git-rad-remote helper to your $PATH.

Navigate to your woking copy in a terminal. Here you can inspect the remotes of your project by running git remote show. For example, a project that tracks multiple people might look something like this.

$ git remote show
fintohaps@hybaapjdrhj8mg4mathpwjaeuktfzxd8uqfpjknp65fyncehpxxzze
merle@hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g
rad

As you can see, the format of a remote handle is:

<display name>@<Device ID>

where the display name is the name you see when you add a Device ID to your peer selector in Radicle Upstream.

To fetch the changes of a specific remote, run the git fetch command with their remote handle:

$ git fetch merle@hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g
remote: Enumerating objects: 7, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (7/7), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 6 (delta 0), reused 6 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (6/6), 1.50 KiB | 1.50 MiB/s, done.
From rad://hwd1yre8wtxufyqnt8xzxt8ps3n7ww8qzpfmud5pibarumshawnpcrjzjme
 * [new ref]         hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g/heads/main -> merle/main

A successful fetch will have a similar output to the example above and show that the reference is now located as a remote branch (e.g. merle@hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g/main). We can confirm this is under a remote branch by entering the following command:

$ git branch -a
main
remotes/merle@hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g/main
remotes/rad/main

Merging Changes

Once changes have been fetched, you can view the changes by running git diff on the specific branch of your remote (e.g. <remote handle>/<branch name>):

$ git diff merle@hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g/main 
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index b72e7d4..8c98464 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1 +1 @@
-Radicle is the next big thing!
+Radicle

If you are happy with these changes, you can merge them into your own branch:

$ git merge merle@hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g/main
[main e6ee76d] Merge remote-tracking branch 'merle/main' into main

or for those of you who prefer rebasing:

$ git rebase merle@hyb1exienq5txww75rgdftuf6j78qehtigma6hn19zt8gz5pu5k73g/main
[main 3e0e32d] Radicle Update
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/main.

This puts your working copy in a state this up-to-date with your contributor's changes. Once you have commited changes to your working copy, you can publish them changes to the Radicle network by running git push rad(See Pushing changes):

$ git push rad main
Enumerating objects: 2, done.
Counting objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (2/2), 1.72 KiB | 1.72 MiB/s, done.
Total 2 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
To rad://hwd1yre8wtxufyqnt8xzxt8ps3n7ww8qzpfmud5pibarumshawnpcrjzjme.git
   e6ee76d..57917bf  main -> main

If you are connected to the network, these changes will also be published to the network and gossiped to your connected peers. If you are a maintainer, this means that anybody who tracks your project will be able to find, view, and fetch your updates to the project.

Make sure that your client is running when you run git push rad to ensure changes are successfully published. If you can't see your changes in Upstream, see the FAQ for more help.