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Advanced Git

Third Edition · Git 2.50 · Console

Before You Begin

Section 0: 6 chapters
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Section I: Advanced Git

Section 1: 7 chapters
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Section II: Git Workflows

Section 2: 5 chapters
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11. Forking Workflow
Written by Jawwad Ahmad

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In this chapter, you’ll learn all about the Forking Workflow. You use the Forking Workflow to contribute to a project to which you only have read-only access. It’s mainly used when contributing to open-source projects, but you can also use it with private repositories.

When you don’t have push access to a project, you’ll need to push your changes to a public copy of the project. This personal, public copy of the project is called a fork. The original or source repository is conventionally referred to as the upstream repository.

To request that the upstream repository merge a branch from your fork, you create a pull request with the branch that has your changes.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create a fork, keep it up to date and contribute back to the upstream repository with a pull request. You’ll also learn how to merge in open pull requests and branches from other forks.

Getting started

As a software developer, you’ve likely heard of FizzBuzz. In case you haven’t, it’s a programming task where, for numbers from 1 to 100, you print either the number itself or a word. For multiples of three, you print Fizz, for multiples of five, you print Buzz, and for multiples of both three and five, you print FizzBuzz.

For example, here are the first fifteen items:

1
2
Fizz
4
Buzz
Fizz
7
8
Fizz
Buzz
11
Buzz
13
14
FizzBuzz

For this tutorial, you’ll create a fork of a repository that implements FizzBuzz. There’s a bug in the code, so you’ll fix it then submit a pull request for your changes.

In a browser, open the following URL for the repository:

https://github.com/kodecocodes/git-book-fizzbuzz

Now, click the Fork button at the top-right corner of the page:

You may also have to click a Create fork confirmation button on the next screen:

You’ll see a progress screen indicating that GitHub is creating your fork:

Once GitHub finishes, it will redirect you to the newly-created fork under your personal GitHub account. You’ll see the URL of the page in your browser change to https://github.com/{your-github-username}/git-book-fizzbuzz.

Next, click the Code button drop-down, then click the copy icon to copy the repository’s SSH URL:

Now, open Terminal and cd to the starter folder of this project:

cd path/to/projects/starter

Note: You can clone the project anywhere but cloning to starter will make it easier to use the included commit_message.txt file to create your commit.

Next, type git clone, add a space and paste the copied repository URL.

You should have the following, with your GitHub username in place of {username}:

git clone git@github.com:{username}/git-book-fizzbuzz.git

Press Enter to execute the command. You’ll see the following, confirming the clone:

Cloning into 'git-book-fizzbuzz'...
...
...
Resolving deltas: 100% (17/17), done.

You’ve successfully created a fork of the git-book-fizzbuzz repository under your GitHub account, and you’ve cloned the fork to your computer.

Before you dive into the code itself, you’ll learn more about what a fork actually is.

A fork is simply a clone

In the previous section, you created a fork and then cloned it. So if a fork is just a clone, then you cloned your clone!

Exploring the code

Change to the git-book-fizzbuzz directory and open fizzbuzz.py in an editor.

Fixing the custom divisors bug

Create a new branch for your fix named fix-divisors-bug:

Opening a pull request

Run the following to push the current branch to your fork:

Rewinding your main branch

Unfortunately, there won’t be any updates to the upstream repository from the time you cloned (or perhaps ever!), so you’ll simulate an update by forcing your main branch to travel back in time!

Updating your fork via GitHub

You can use the Sync fork button on GitHub to update your fork directly from the upstream repository.

Updating your fork using an upstream remote

This method of updating is slightly more involved, but at one point, it was the only way you could do so. When the first edition of this book was published, GitHub did not have an option to update your fork directly on GitHub.

Fetching changes from other forks

You may occasionally want to merge feature branches from other forks into your fork. Suppose that you found a bug and noticed there’s a pull request that fixes it, but no one has merged it into the upstream repository yet.

Fetching directly from a URL

To fetch from a URL, just use that URL in place of the remote name. So, for example, instead of git fetch upstream, you’d run:

Fetching a pull request

Any branches that are part of a pull request are available on the upstream repository in a special reference that uses the format: pull/{ID}/head. So for this pull request, it would be pull/69/head.

Adding an additional remote

Run the following to add jawwad’s fork as an additional remote named jawwad:

Merging the pull request

Run the following to merge the allow-custom-range branch:

Key points

  • The Forking Workflow is used to contribute to repositories that you don’t have push access to, like open-source repositories.
  • Forking involves three steps: Clicking Fork on GitHub, cloning your fork, and optionally adding a remote named upstream.
  • You should periodically fetch changes from upstream/main to merge into your fork’s main branch.
  • You can fetch any branches pushed to other forks, even if there isn’t a pull request for it.
  • To fetch all changes from a named remote, use git fetch {remotename}.
  • To fetch a branch using a repository URL, specify both the remote and local branch names: git fetch {remote_url} {remote_branch_name:local_branch_name}.
10. Gitflow Workflow
12. Conclusion
Have a technical question? Want to report a bug? You can ask questions and report bugs to the book authors in our official book forum here.
© 2026 Kodeco Inc.

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