Working on fork and upstream

When you fork a repo, Github makes your own copy of the project. If you forked Rails in 2014, your fork is now 2 years outdated unless you synced it with the original repo (called upstream).

In this post, I'll show the efficient way to sync your fork with the upstream.

When I clone my fork, I create two upstreams: for my fork and for the upstream (original repo).

$ git clone [email protected]:kirs/rails.git
$ cd rails
# create remote for the original repo
$ git remote add upstream [email protected]:rails/rails.git

And then comes my awesome script that updates my fork:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# set bash to strict mode
set -eu
set -v

# make sure we're on master
git checkout master
# pull original repo
git fetch upstream
# sync your master with upstream master and force push
git reset --hard upstream/master
git push origin master --force

I put that script to ~/.bin/sync-upstream with ~/.bin added to my $PATH. Now I can call sync-upstream from any directory.

I have two usecases to use the script:

1. When my PR was merged and I'd like to get a fresh master that includes my changes
2. When I haven't been working on the project for a while and I want to make sure that I don't sent new PR based on the old codebase.

Happy forking!