I forked a GitHub repo thoughtbot/dotfiles to croaky/dotfiles and want to
keep it updated.
Track
After I forked the repo to your Github account, I did this one time:
git clone git@github.com:croaky/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles
git remote add upstream git@github.com:thoughtbot/dotfiles.git
Update
Each time I want to update, from my local main branch:
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/main
The goal of the rebase is to have a cleaner history if I have local changes or commits on the repo. It’s the difference between the the left and the right in the image below.
If you want to learn more rebasing a forked repo on top of main, Git interactive rebase, squash, amend and other ways of rewriting history provides more detail about it.
Commit rights upstream
If I also have commit rights to the upstream repo, I can create a local
upstream branch and do work that will go upstream there.
git checkout -b upstream upstream/main