How to change the fork that a repository is linked to

Question

I have a repo called at MAIN/repo.git and I've forked it to FORK/repo.git. I have both of these repos cloned onto my computer for different purposes.

Using Github for Windows, a bug seems to have switched FORK/repo.git over to MAIN/repo.git, as when I do git remote show origin, the Fetch URL and Push URL are set to the main repo. How can I switch this back so the corresponding folder on my local machine points to FORK/repo.git, instead of MAIN/repo.git?

Answer 1

The easiest way would be using command-line git remote, from within your local clone of FORK:

git remote rm origin git remote add origin https://github.com/user/FORK.git 

Or, in one command, as illustrated in this GitHub article:

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/user/FORK.git 

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A better practice is to:

• keep a remote referencing the original repo
• make your work in new branches (which will have upstream branches tracking your fork)

So:

git remote rename origin upstream git branch -avv # existing branches like master are linked to upstream/xxx  git remote add origin https://github.com/user/FORK.git git checkout -b newFeatureBranch 

Whenever you need to update your fork based on the recent evolution of the original repo:

git checkout master git pull # it pulls from upstream! git checkout newFeatureBranch git rebase master # safe if you are alone working on that branch git push --force # ditto. It pushes to origin, which is your fork.