How to commit a change to a homebrew formula?

Question

I made a change to some homebrew formula which fixes an issue I had. I also opened an issue to get that fix into the repository.

But no one has responded yet. Now I want to update my homebrew installation. Which fails of course, since I have local changes that have not yet been committed. So I followed the instructions on the homebrew wiki, which tells me to do all sorts of funny things with git. Now git, I have no experience with.

I guess it all went rather fine until it says I should push.

git push git@github.com:myname/homebrew.git

Obviously, I substituted my Github name for myname, but it would still fail saying

Permission denied (publickey)
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

This is rather sad. I would have liked to contribute my little fix. Funny enough, after doing all this, brew update would work again.

Anyway, why is git push not working for me? How can I contribute my fix to the awesome homebrew project?

Answer 1

Did you hit the fork button like the instructions said? If you didn't do that the operation would fail in this manner because you don't have a repository to push to.

If you did do that, you might want to take a look at GitHub's SSH troubleshooting page to figure out what might be going wrong and how to fix it.

Alternatively, you can sidestep those issues by pushing over HTTP instead. To do so, use this command:

git push https://yourname@github.com/yourname/homebrew.git