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First of all, make sure the the PR you want to merge does not contain merge conflicts. If that is not the case, it's best to ask the contributor to resolve any merge conflicts by rebasing against the master branch. If all conflicts have been resolved you can start merging the PR by fetching it into your local clone of repository. To do this the GitHub mirror has to be defined as a remote in your local clone. This only has to be done once and you can check whether you already did it with:

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$ git remote show -n
github
origin

If you don't have an entry for the github mirror yet, you can add one with:

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The pull makes sure you have the lastest changes from the Apache repository in your local clone. Merging with --no-ff option will create a separate merge commit. This is why your $EDITOR will be started asking you to provide a commit message. The first line will be "Merge branch 'fix-foo-in-bar'". You should leave it this way so the fact that this branch has been merged can be seen in the history. Furthermore a reference to the corrensponding Jira should be added. For an example see https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=commons-lang.git;a=commit;h=640953167adf3580a2c21077d78e7e7ce84ead03 If the PR did not contain merge conflicts, only the commits you added before merging can produce merge conflicts. This happens for example if you've added the corresponding jira issue to changes.xml but the master branch already contained newer entries. Resolve all conflicts, all files using $ git add . and then finalize the merge with $ git commit. Up to this point you've only modified your local repository. So it's time to push the changes back to the Apache git repository:

$ git push origin master

If you've done it right, the PR will be marked as merged at GitHub. Remember that this will only work if the original commits of the contributor show up in the history of the component's repository.