Fork Your Own Repo on GitHub

A common time-saving ‘hack’ of mine when building ‘new-but-related-to-old’ projects is to fork an existing code base and use it as the bootstrap for the new project. GitHub, however, does not provide the functionality on their website to fork your own project; you can only fork other people’s projects. Here’s how to work around that.

Create the new destination project on GitHub.

A screenshot of GitHub showing MikeCoats creating a repo called test-project-2.

Create a new directory on your local computer to hold the new repository.

~$ mkdir test-project-2

~$ cd test-project-2

~/test-project-2$ git init .
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/mike/test-project-2/.git/

Add the new project as the origin remote and the old project as the upstream remote.

~/test-project-2$ git remote add origin https://github.com/MikeCoats/test-project-2.git

~/test-project-2$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/MikeCoats/test-project-1.git

Pull the code from the upstream project.

~/test-project-2 $ git pull upstream master
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 3 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From https://github.com/MikeCoats/test-project-1
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
 * [new branch]      master     -> upstream/master

Push it to the origin project.

~/test-project-2 $ git push origin master
Enumerating objects: 3, done.
Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 881 bytes | 881.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/MikeCoats/test-project-2.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master

Congratulations! You’ve successfully forked your own repo on GitHub!

2017-07-04