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Developer Documentation

Pre Condition 3: Code on the local machine

This section explains how you get the JabRef code onto your machine in a form allowing you to make contributions.

Fork JabRef into your GitHub account

  1. Log into your GitHub account
  2. Go to https://github.com/JabRef/jabref
  3. Create a fork by clicking at fork button on the right top corner
  4. A fork repository will be created under your account https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/jabref.

Clone your forked repository on your local machine

In a command line, navigate to the folder where you want to place the source code (parent folder of jabref). To prevent issues along the way, it is strongly recommend choosing a path that does not contain any special (non-ASCII or whitespace) characters. In the following, we will use c:\git-repositories as base folder:

cd \
mkdir git-repositories
cd git-repositories
git clone --depth=10 https://github.com/JabRef/jabref.git
cd jabref
git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/jabref.git
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/main main

Note that putting the repo JabRef directly on C:\ or any other drive letter on Windows causes compile errors (negative example: C:\jabref).

Further, if you are building on Windows, make sure that the absolute path to the location of the clone does not contain folders starting with ‘u’ (negative example: C:\university\jabref) as this may currently also cause compile errors.

Background

Initial cloning might be very slow (27.00 KiB/s).

To prevent this, first the upstream repository is cloned. This repository seems to live in the caches of GitHub.

The --depth--10 is used to limit the download to ~20 MB instead of downloading the complete history (~800 MB). If you want to dig in our commit history, feel free to download everything.

Now, you have two remote repositories, where origin is yours and upstream is the one of the JabRef organization.

You can see it with git remote -v:

c:\git-repositories\jabref> git remote -v
origin     https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/jabref.git (fetch)
origin     https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/jabref.git (push)
upstream     https://github.com/jabref/jabref.git (fetch)
upstream     https://github.com/jabref/jabref.git (push)