Lesson 3. Sync a GitHub Repo: How To Ensure Your GitHub Fork Is Up To Date

Syncing GitHub Repos

When you are collaborating with others on a project, there are often changes being made to the repo that you (and others) are contributing to. It is important keep your fork up to date or in sync with those changes as you work. Keeping your fork in sync with the central repo will reduce the risk of merge conflicts (a topic that you will learn more about in a later chapter).

Syncing Your GitHub Repo Reduces the Chances of a Merge Conflict

A merge conflict occurs when two people edit the same line in a file. Git does not know how to resolve the conflict (i.e. which changes to keep and which to remove).

When git does not know how to resolve a conflict, it will ask you to manually fix the conflict. If you sync your files regularly, you will ultimately reduce the risk of a merge conflict.

An Example Workflow Where Syncing Is Important

Pretend that you are working on a fork of your colleague’s repo. Your colleague’s repo is the final home for the code and content that you are working together on collaboratively.

Your colleague and others in your group may be updating code while you are working. It is important to ensure that your fork is in sync with your colleague’s repo, ideally before making a new pull request to that repo.

Your repo being in sync refers to your fork having all of the commits or changes to the code and files that have been made to the parent repo.

Two Ways to Sync A Repo - Command Line and on GitHub

There are a few ways to update or sync your repo with the central repo (e.g. your colleague’s repo).

1. You can perform a “Reverse Pull Request” on GitHub. A reverse pull request will follow the same steps as a regular pull request. However, in this case, your fork becomes the base and your colleague’s repo is the head. If you update your fork this way, you will then have to PULL your changes down to your local clone of the repo (on your computer) where you are working.
2. You can manually set or pull down changes from the central repo to your clone locally. This can be done in the Terminal. When you update your local clone, you will then need to push the changes or commits back up to your fork on GitHub.com.

This lesson will focus on syncing your fork using a reverse pull request approach on GitHub.com.

Sync Your Forked GitHub Repo Using A Pull Request

To sync your forked repo with the parent or central repo you:

1. Create a pull request on GitHub.com to update your fork of the repository from the original repository, and
2. Run the git pull command in the Terminal to update your local clone. The following sections review how to complete these steps.

How To Sync or Update Your Forked Repo Using the Github Website

To update your fork on GitHub.com, navigate in your web browser to the main GitHub.com page of your forked repository (e.g. https://github.com/your-username/example-repository if you created a fork in previous chapter on version control with git).

On this web page, create a pull request by following these steps:

1. Click on the New pull request button to begin the pull request.
2. On the new page, choose your fork as the base fork and the original repository (e.g. your colleague’s repo) as the head fork.
   • IMPORTANT: You need to click on the text compare across forks to be able to select the base and head forks appropriately.
3. Then, click on Create pull request.
4. On the new page, click on Create pull request once more to finish creating the pull request.

When you create this pull request, you will see what files will be updated in your fork.

After creating the pull request, you need to merge the pull request, so that the changes in your colleague’s repo are merged into your fork. The next section of this page explains how to merge a pull request.

How to Merge a Pull Request

To merge a pull request:

1. Open up the pull request if it is not already open on GitHub.
2. Click on the green button at the bottom of the pull request page that says Merge pull request.
3. Click on the Confirm merge button.

Once you have conformed the merge, all of the changes from your colleague’s repo are in your repo. When you return to your fork on GitHub.com, you will see the changes that you have just merged into your fork.

When you update your fork using a reverse pull request on GitHub.com, you then need to update your files locally. The steps to do that are below.

How to Update Your Local Clone

Once you have synced (i.e. updated) your fork on GitHub.com, you are ready to update your cloned repo on your local computer.

To pull down (i.e. copy) the changes merged into your fork, you can use the Terminal and the git pull command.

To begin:

1. On your local computer, navigate to your forked repo directory.
2. Once you have changed directories to the forked repo directory, run the command git pull.

The code that you type into the terminal might look something like the example below:

$ cd path-to-repo/repo-name
$ git pull

You have now updated your local clone with the updates that you merged into your fork from original GitHub repository.