forking.md

Git Fork on Gihub

One of the core value with github is that the code became social: you fork a project, modify it and push some pull requests.

I'm writing this as a remainder of the different steps.

Forking

Forking on github is really easy, as a testament of the fact that this is a core value of the platform. Github has some nice documentation on Working with Forks.
What it's important to remember is to add the upstream repository to your local copy to be able to keep it in sync: Configuring a remote Fork

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git

then you can check that the upstream repository is there:

$ git remote -v
origin    https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_FORK.git (fetch)
origin    https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_FORK.git (push)
upstream  https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git (fetch)
upstream  https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git (push)

Sync your fork

Once you've the upstream repository setup you can fetch the changes from there: Sync your fork

git fetch upstream

Check out local fork master branch:

git checkout master

Merge the changes in upstream/master into the local changes:

git merge upstream/master

Creating Pull Requests from a fork

At the end, the idea to make so easy to work with forks is to make it easy to contribute to other people projects with a pull request: Creating a pull request from a fork.