How to fork your own repository

How to fork your own repository

A git fork is really just a git clone plus a change of ownership.  What this does is a git clone plus a change of name, maintaining an upstream link to the source repo so you can integrate changes.

Here's a recipe for duplicating a repo: 

git clone username/old_repo new_repo
cd new_repo
git remote rename origin upstream
git create username/new_repo
git push -u origin master

This uses the "hub" addon for command-line git integration with github; find it at https://hub.github.com.  If you prefer not to use it, the following recipe is a bit more work:

git clone git@github.com:USERNAME/OLD_REPO.git NEW_REPO
cd NEW_REPO
git remote rename origin upstream
[create empty repo on github]
git set remote origin git@github.com:USERNAME/NEW_REPO.git
git push -u origin master

By default, any git push will go to the repository you most recently pulled from, which means the repository you cloned from.  For those of us who always say 'git pull origin master' this isn't a problem; for those of us who rely on defaults, this setting will set the default for git push to do the right thing:

git config --global remote.pushdefault origin

If you want to integrate changes from the original repository: git pull upstream