Creating a GitHub Pull Request from within PhpStorm

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So you’ve worked on some code forked from GitHub and want to send it back to the original repository… Chances are you’ll be doing this using a Pull Request. These let us tell others about changes we’ve pushed to a GitHub repository so they can review, comment and discuss the proposed modifications. Once a Pull Request is approved, the changes included in it are committed to a branch of the original repository.

Many open source projects are using this workflow: everyone can create a fork of the project. When a developer finishes some work, a Pull Request is created where project maintainers can do code reviews and discuss changes before accepting the contribution.

There’s no need to interrupt your coding streak and switch to a browser: Pull Requests can be opened right from within PhpStorm. Let’s see.

This functionality is available in IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, PhpStorm, RubyMine and AppCode.

Using the VCS | Git | Create Pull Request menu, we can select the target branch for our Pull Request as well as a title and description. Clicking OK will publish it to GitHub:

Clicking Show Diff gives us an overview of all changes that will be included in the pull request. The Log tab shows us a list of all commits and file modifications that will be proposed:

If needed, we can use the Diff tab to generate a per-file diff of all changes. Here’s a diff of the performance fix we’re creating a Pull Request for:

And while we’re at it, there are quite a few other options available for working with GitHub from within the IDE. Give them a try and let us hear your thoughts in the issue tracker, through the comments below or in our forums!

Develop with pleasure!

– JetBrains PhpStorm Team