Maintaining a branch that syncing with upstream

Question

I'm planning to add some code based on a project on github, e.g. add some customerized options that fit my project.

One idea is to fork and create a branch to include all my changes. Every time upstream has new changes, I fetch and rebase them to my branch.

Suppose these are my remotes:

$ git remote -v
my   [email protected]:khing/myproject.git (fetch)
my   [email protected]:khing/pyproject.git (push)
up   https://github.com/upstream/project.git (fetch)
up   https://github.com/upstream/project.git (push)

upstream has three commits: A, B, C, and I have two extra commits: M, N

So I guess current branches will be like:

up: A--B--C
my: A--B--C--M--N

Suppose upstream has two new commits D and E, I should fetch and rebase (and yes, I might have to fix merge conflicts), so I guess it will be:

up: A--B--C--D--E
my: A--B--C--D--E--M--N

Is this a good way maintaining my own branch while keeping up-to-date with an upstream branch?

Answer 1

Yes. That is what I described in "Pull new updates from original GitHub repository into forked GitHub repository".

Since that answer (2010), you can:

• configure to always pull from the original upstream repo

  git remote set-url origin https://github.com/upstream/project.git
  git remote set-url --push origin [email protected]:khing/myproject.git 
  

• make sure you always rebase your local commits on top of what is fetched:
  (needs Git 2.9+, June 2016, see "Can “git pull” automatically stash and pop pending changes?")

  git config pull.rebase true
  git config rebase.autoStash true
  

Then a simple git pull is enough.