How to merge a pull request

Assume userfoo has sent us a pull request. We want to test their changes locally and possibly make some edits before merging the pull request into our repository.

Create a new temporary branch based on master to test the changes.

git checkout -b <temp-branch-name> master

Download the pull request. We need the url and branch name; we can get these from the GitHub pull request page by clicking the command line instructions link.

git pull <url> <branch-name>

We can now review, test, and edit the changes locally. To merge the edited pull request, first commit our edits to the temporary branch, then:

git checkout master
git merge --no-ff <temp-branch-name>
git push origin master

We can now delete the temporary branch:

git branch -d <temp-branch-name>