I just had to update a repo that I forked on GitHub. This is how I did it. Did I
do it the correct way?
Sculpin
People may or may not know, but this site runs on
Sculpin, a PHP based static site generator (this may be
the first time that I've mentioned it on this site). The source code is hosted
on GitHub, and I've listed the
site on the Community page on the Sculpin
website.
To get it there, I forked the
main sculpin.io repository so that I
had my own copy, created a branch,
made my additions and submitted a pull request. Easy enough!
New Domain
In the last week or so, I've changed this site URL from .co.uk to just .uk, and
also updated the GitHub repo URL to match, so I wanted to update the Community
page to use the correct URL.
There had been commits to the main repo since my pull request was merged, I
didn't want to delete my repo and fork again, and making any changes against and
old codebase isn't best practice, so I wanted to merge the latest changes into
my forked repo before I did anything else - just to check that I didn't break
anything!
Updating my Local Repo
I had a quick look for a Update my fork button or something, but couldn't see
one to I added the main repository as an additional remote called upstream and
fetched the changes.
Now my local site knows about the upstream repo, and I could rebase the changes
(git pull upstream master should have worked too) and push them back to
origin.
$ git rebase upstream/master
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
...
Fast-forwarded master to upstream/master.
$ git push origin master
This seems to have worked OK - the commits are still authored by the correct
people and at the correct date and time - and I went ahead and created a new
feature branch and pull request based on that master branch.
Is There a Better Way?
Did I miss something? Is there a recommended and/or better way to update your
forked repos, maybe through the UI? Please
send
me a tweet with any comments.
Up
December 2015: I’ve found that PhpStorm has an option available to rebase a
fork from within the IDE. This is within the VCS > Git menu.
I believe that it will use an existing "upstream" remote if it exists, otherwise
it will add one automatically for you, linking to the repository that you forked
from.
Once you’ve completed the rebase, you can then push your updated branch either
from the terminal, or using the Push command from the same menu.
It would be great to see something similar added to
hub too (I’ve created
an issue)!
I'm an Acquia-certified Drupal Triple Expert with 17 years of experience, an open-source software maintainer and Drupal core contributor, public speaker, live streamer, and host of the Beyond Blocks podcast.