Git working with forked repos

content/posts/working-with-forked-repos.md

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+---
+title: Working With Forked Repos
+description: Fetching upstream and things
+date: 2019-02-02
+tags:
+  - Tech
+---
+
+Though I've been building web apps for many years, my direct experience with contributing to open source projects is surprisingly limited. Thus when I found myself forking and maintaining a fork as I submitted several PR's for a single project over time I was a little lost with what to do.
+
+So here are some things I've learned thus far.
+
+## Why Fork, and How do I Fork?
+
+Github, Gitlab and other source-code repositories allow for you to "fork" code. I previously thought this was to split work into a different direction, but in fact its also to give a developer control over proposed changes they'd like to push back to source. Thus, submitting a PR to an open source repository looks like this:
+
+1. Click `Fork` on the source-code repository
+2. Clone your newly forked repository
+3. Make your changes on a new branch
+4. Push your branch to your forked repository (A misconception I had was you may not push a branch to many open source repositories directly, this is intentional)
+5. Create a PR that merges your branch from your fork to the original non-forked repository
+
+## Updating the Forked Master Branch
+
+Over time your forked repository will get out of date. A common scenario is desiring to get the latest master from the source repository.
+
+```bash
+git remote add upstream ORIGINAL_PROJECT_CLONE_URL
+git fetch upstream
+git checkout master
+git rebase upstream/master
+```
+
+Now you may do all the standard things you wish, such as merging master into your current branch `git merge master` to stay up to date with your proposed changes.
+