Nowadays it’s essential to manage forks in Github if you want to be a better programmer. Github is widely used worldwide and we should know at least how to use it. A key concept in github is the word ‘fork’. When you create a fork based in an (open-source) interesting project from other people or organization, you are doing a copy of that, linked by github to his parent. Since this moment, the two projects will evolve independently. The main reason to fork a project is to make new features or bug removals in your copy and then perform a ‘pull request’ to their parent. Briefly, a pull request is a way to push changes in another project letting the owner in the other project to accept or discard these changes. Of course it presents a problem over time. If the parent project is still developing new features and changes your fork must be updated in order to adquire these new changes and to avoid merge conflicts. I will explain to you how to stay aligned with the original project in a few very simple steps.
By default, if you are using git you should know that you have the alias origin, which means your repository’s url, if more people are working in your project/fork probably you are using git pull origin/master or just git pull to get the new changes in your remote repository in your local machine. Now you will also need another one, I will name it upstream following the main convention, but you can name it as you prefer.
Before all, you can check the list of your remote repositories already configured with this command:
git remote -v
You should be seeing something like this:
origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_FORK.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_FORK.git (push)
which is your fork. To add another remote repository you should type this command:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git
If the original repository were mine, I would type https://github.com/samuelmartingc/corbel-platform.github.io.git Ok, now we can check again the list of our repositories with git remote -v and see that we have the new one too.
The next step is to check the new changes in the parent repository, we can do it with the following command:
git fetch upstream
Then go back to our branch master in which I am working:
git checkout master
And finally perform the merge between both branches:
git merge upstream/master
If you have no conflicts this will be an automatic step, otherwise you should fix the conflicts before finish. At last but not least, you must remember to push the new changes in your branch to your remote repository with a simple git push.
I hope that you have enjoyed this post or, at least, you have found it useful. Have a good day 🙂
Samuel Martin