Github: how to fork after cloning?

Question

I cloned a git repo to my local machine, played around with it a bit and found it cool.

Now I would like to keep the result as I modified it in my own github space. How can I proceed?

I suppose the regular way would have been to fork the repo on the first place to my space, clone it, modify and then push it to GitHub, but now I cloned the original's author repo, how can I commit that as a new thing in my personnal?

Answer 1

First rename the old remote as upstream, in case you want to be able to keep in sync with the original repository.

git remote rename origin upstream 

Then add your forked repository as origin:

git remote add origin https://github.com/<your-username>/<your-project> 

Or if you're using ssh:

git remote add origin [email protected]:<your-username>/<your-project>.git 

To push to your repository:

git push -u origin master 

To pull from the base repository:

git pull upstream 

I recommend you do all of your work in a separate branch, not the master branch. It will be easier to rebase to the upstream/master branch in case you want to make a pull request.

You don't really have to rename the origin to upstream - the remote names can be arbitrary, however I recommended you to do so to keep up with the naming convention used by GitHub.

Answer 2

On the github webpage create a fork in the usual way. Then go to your repository and add a remote which points to your fork: git remote add myfork [email protected]:you/your-fork.git. This adds a remote called "myfork" which you can push to. You could also change the url of the "origin" fork; this will get you exactly the same state as if you had cloned from your fork to begin with: git remote set-url origin [email protected]:you/your-fork.git.