How do I update a GitHub forked repository?

Question

I recently forked a project and applied several fixes. I then created a pull request which was then accepted.

A few days later another change was made by another contributor. So my fork doesn't contain that change.

How can I get that change into my fork? Do I need to delete and re-create my fork when I have further changes to contribute? Or is there an update button?

Answer 1

I update my forked repos with this one line:

git pull https://github.com/forkuser/forkedrepo.git branch

Use this if you dont want to add another remote endpoint to your project, as other solutions posted here.

Answer 2

Actually, it is possible to create a branch in your fork from any commit of the upstream in the browser:

• Open https://github.com/<repo>/commits/<hash>, where repo is your fork, and hash is full hash of commit which you can find in the upstream web interface. For example, I can open https://github.com/max630/linux/commits/0aa0313f9d576affd7747cc3f179feb097d28990, which points to linux master as time of writing.
• Click on the "Tree: ...." button.
• Type name of the new branch and press Enter

You can then fetch that branch to your local clone, and you won't have to push all that data back to GitHub when you push edits on top of that commit. Or use the web interface to change something in that branch.

How it works (it is a guess, I don't know how exactly GitHub does it): forks share object storage and use namespaces to separate users' references. So you can access all commits through your fork, even if they did not exist by the time of forking.

Answer 3

Since November 2013 there has been an unofficial feature request open with GitHub to ask them to add a very simple and intuitive method to keep a local fork in sync with upstream:

https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/121

Note: Since the feature request is unofficial it is also advisable to contact [e-mail] to add your support for a feature like this to be implemented. The unofficial feature request above could be used as evidence of the amount of interest in this being implemented.

Answer 4

Foreword: Your fork is the "origin" and the repository you forked from is the "upstream".

Let's assume that you cloned already your fork to your computer with a command like this:

git clone [e-mail]:your_name/project_name.git
cd project_name

If that is given then you need to continue in this order:

1. Add the "upstream" to your cloned repository ("origin"):

   git remote add upstream [e-mail]:original_author/project_name.git
   

2. Fetch the commits (and branches) from the "upstream":

   git fetch upstream
   

3. Switch to the "master" branch of your fork ("origin"):

   git checkout master
   

4. Stash the changes of your "master" branch:

   git stash
   

5. Merge the changes from the "master" branch of the "upstream" into your the "master" branch of your "origin":

   git merge upstream/master
   

6. Resolve merge conflicts if any and commit your merge

   git commit -am "Merged from upstream"
   

7. Push the changes to your fork

   git push
   

8. Get back your stashed changes (if any)

   git stash pop
   

9. You're done! Congratulations!

GitHub also provides instructions for this topic: Syncing a fork