Contributing to Batocera.linux

This page is, currently, far from being perfect, we recommend anyone who wishes to contribute to batocera to join the Discord server if there is any question or error here.

Batocera is an open-source software, it's source code can be found at https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux, in order to contribute to the code, you can make a Pull Request with the changes you made to the OS.

There are multiple steps to make a pull request, the first one is to fork batocera, then to clone that fork locally, to make the changes locally, test them, and once it is done, to create a local branch on your fork, push your changes to it, then ask for a pull request containing those changes.

We will need to use git for this.

The first time, you will need to fork the system and clone it locally. The next time, you will simply need to make your local copy up to date with the upstream branch.

To make a Pull Request, you first need to make a fork of batocera.linux :

1. Login to your github account
2. Go to https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux
3. Click on the Fork button on the right

This will create a fork at https://github.com/YOURNAME/batocera.linux where YOURNAME is your github username.

You have to clone this fork locally, the easiest way is to open a command line and type git clone https://github.com/YOURNAME/batocera.linux where YOURNAME is your github username.

You then need to go into the created folder (which should be batocera.linux), once inside, you will need to tell it this is a fork of https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux using the following commands :

• git remote add upstream https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux.git
• git remote set-url upstream https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux.git

Finally, you have to tell it the URL of your own fork itself using :

• git remote set-url origin https://github.com/YOURNAME/batocera.linux where YOURNAME is your github username.

You have some guidelines on this page to compile individual packages or this page for more general compilation of the whole Batocera Linux system.

You then need to make a local branch using git checkout -b Name-of-the-branch , once this is done, you have to commit your changes to it using git commit.

Once all of this is done, you have to send them to your fork using the git push --set-upstream origin Name-of-the-branch

You can now go into your github fork link, and click on Pull Request, this will let you ask to merge the changes into the main repository.

Once you have made this at least once, you can simply make your own master branch up to date with the upstream master branch. to do this, you need to do:

1. git checkout master : Tells git to use the master branch
2. git fetch upstream : Tells git to grab every changes from the upstream repository
3. git rebase upstream/master : Tells git to make your branch up to date with the master branch of the upstream repository

You then make your changes, create a new branch using git checkout -b Name-of-the-branch and commit your changes to it like before, the rest doesn't change from the first time.