How to fast track branch after pull request in Github

Question

Not sure if this is the place to ask questions about Github.

I have forked a public repo and added two commits to it, then sent to the original author asking for a pull request. The author have complied with the request and now I'd wish to fast track my own repo to the HEAD of the author's repo. All of my new commits are in the author's repo now, so there aren't any side-tracked commits (what's the proper name for this btw? I thought it was fork but that sounded weird considering how Github refer to forks.).

Thanks!

Answer 1

As described in the GitHub help page for fork, the best policy here is to:

• define a remote called upstream and pointing to the original repo (the one where the author accepted your pull request)
• pull from that upstream repo

Pull in upstream changes

If the original repo you forked your project from gets updated, you can add those updates to your fork by running the following code:

$ git fetch upstream
$ git merge upstream/master

Or you could, after the fetch, reset your master branch to upstream/master, in order to have the exact same history.

So, when you fork a repo, and clone that forked repo to your workstation:

• remote 'origin' refers to your fork
• remote 'upstream' refers to the original repo that your forked. You need to explicitly add that remote reference to your repo.