Re-fork a repository on GitHub

Question

I've forked a repository on GitHub and have a quite an extensive commit/pull/push history, which I need to keep.

The owner of the main repository has created some new branches. How can I clone these branches into my forked copy, without deleting the fork and cloning from scratch?

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7244321/how-to-update-github-forked-repository — Guy, Nov 05 '14 at 12:41

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

You'll want to add the other repository as a remote for your own one.

Got to where you've got your repository on your computer and open git Bash and do:

git remote add upstream <address of the repository you cloned from>

Then whenever you need to update your fork just do:

git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master

That will reapply whatever changes are on your current branch on top of any changes from the other repository. Note to make things easier I usually leave the master branch on my repository untouched and only work in branches. Then whenever I need to update I just rebase master and rebase my other branches on top of that.

Don't know about getting other branches for upstream though but this answer may be of help: How do I check out a remote Git branch?

I think the parameters are the other way around? (At least this seems to have worked for me): git remote add upstream — Hugo, May 16 '16 at 19:09
Yeah, it looks like you're right. I'll fix that in my reply. — Sollace, May 17 '16 at 20:41

Re-fork a repository on GitHub

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