Fork (Git)

A fork is your own server-side copy of someone else's repository, created on a hosting platform such as GitHub or GitLab. You can change the copy freely without permission from the original owner, and you can offer your changes back through a pull request.

Why it matters

Forking is the standard way to contribute to open-source projects where you lack write access. The original repository is conventionally called upstream, and your fork is a separate repository that you clone locally. Forks are also used to take a project in a new direction; in that sense a "fork" can mean a long-lived divergent project, such as MariaDB from MySQL. A fork is a hosting feature built on top of Git, not a Git command itself.

Example

git clone https://github.com/you/project.git
cd project
git remote add upstream https://github.com/original/project.git
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/main     # bring your fork up to date

You push branches to your fork (origin) and open a pull request against upstream.

Common mistakes

• Working on the fork's main branch and letting it drift far behind upstream.
• Confusing a fork with a branch, which lives inside one repository.
• Forgetting that forks of private repositories may stay private and have different permissions.

Related

• Pull request
• Git branch
• Open source
• Git

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