Github - Switch to fork

05 October 2017

Say you just have cloned a massive github repository (like Netbeans) where cloning already takes minutes and now decide to contribute. You will fork the repo and than clone the fork and spend another X minutes waiting?

This sometimes seems like to much of an effort. And thankfully, there are steps how you can transform the already cloned repo to use your fork.

  1. Fork the repo

  2. Rename origin to upstream (your fork will be origin)

    git remote rename origin upstream

  3. Set origin as your fork

    git remote add origin git@github...my-fork

  4. Fetch origin

    git fetch origin

  5. Make master track new origin/master

    git checkout -B master --track origin/master