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Forking

Forking concept in git and github

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7 views

Forking

Forking concept in git and github

Uploaded by

musahissahop
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Forking

In previous lessons, you have touched on workflows such as branching and how they can
be used to simplify a process for a team. Forking is another type of workflow. The key
difference between branching and forking is that the workflow for forking creates a new
repository entirely. Branching cuts a new branch from the same repository each time and
each member of the team works on the single repository.
Let's take a simple example of how forking works. In the diagram below the coolgame repo
has been forked by Joe. The entire contents and the history of the repository are now stored
in Joe's account on GitHub. Joe is now free to make edits and changes to the repository at
his own will. You, the owner of the coolgame repository can continue to work as normal
and not know about Joe's edits or changes.

Joe created a new branch on his repository and added a new cool feature that he felt was
needed. In order for Joe to get his feature back into the original repository, he will need to
create a PR as normal but instead of comparing with the main branch, it needs to be
compared with the original repository. Essentially the two repositories are compared
against each other. The owner of the original repository can then review the PR and choose
to accept of decline the new feature.
Forking
Let us take a look at how you can fork an existing repository that is available on GitHub. For
this example, we used a repository we can access on GitHub.
Step 1: If you have access to your own repository on GitHub, you can access this now to
follow along.
Step 2: Click on the Fork button on the top right of the page.

Step 3: It will then prompt you to fork the repository to your desired account. Choose the
account you wish to fork to.
Step 4: Github will then clone the repository into your chosen GitHub account.
In a couple of steps, you have successfully forked a repository into our own GitHub
account. The full repository is cloned and allows us to work directly in that repository as if it
was our own.
On the landing page of the GitHub repository, it will show directly under the repository
name that it was forked from Meta-Front-End-Developer-PC/forking-lesson.

Other subtle differences in the GitHub UI on a forked branch is the top information bar
above the files.
It now shows that the branch is up to date with forking-lesson:main. It also adds a Fetch
upstream drop-down to allow you to pull and merge the latest changes from the original
repository.
Example
Let's run through a typical flow of creating a new branch and adding some new content.
Step 1: Clone the repository.
Step 2: Create a new branch.
git checkout -b test/forking-example
Step 4: Create a new file and commit it to the repository.
touch text.txt git add . git commit -m 'chore: testing'
Step 5 Push the branch to your remote repository.
git push -u origin test/forking-example
Step 6: Go to Github and click the Compare & pull request button. If it's not available, click
on the branch dropdown button and change it from main to the branch name of
test/forking-example:

After clicking the Compare & pull request button it will now redirect to the original
repository in order to create the PR.

Each repository will have its own guidelines for submitting PRs against them and usually
provide a how-to contribute guide. As you can see, in order to get the changes from our
forked repository, you need to compare it against the original. This gives a lot of control to
the repository owners of the original and they get to decide what makes the cut to be
merged in.
In this lesson you covered the basics of forking a repository, adding some changes, and
then creating a PR to get it back to the original repository.

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