While it is easy to create forks of other projects through Github, it isn’t as easy to update your fork from the parent repository. The following steps are what I do to update my fork. These steps assume that you have a local copy of the repository and that everything is up to date and committed.
First you need to add a remote to the repository you forked.
$ git remote add --track <branchname> <projectname> git://github.com/<gitmember>/<project>.git
Where,
master
origin
for your forked instance of the project, so call it something other than origin
.To see that the remote was successfully added you can run
$ git remote -v
which will show all the remotes your local repository currently has.
Next you want to fetch all the changes from the newly added remote.
$ git fetch <projectname>
Where projectname
is the name you assigned to the remote above.
This fetch operation will create a new branch in your repository called projectname/branchname
. With that in place you are ready to merge.
$ git merge projectname/branchname
That’s all there is to updating your fork from the parent repository.