Fork A Repo

If you've found yourself on this page, we're assuming you're brand new to Git and GitHub. This guide will walk you through the basics and explain a little bit about how everything works along the way.

Contributing to a project

At some point you may find yourself wanting to contribute to someone else's project, or would like to use someone's project as the starting point for your own. This is known as "forking." For this tutorial, we'll be using the Spoon-Knife project.

Step 1: Fork the "Spoon-Knife" repository

To fork this project, click the "Fork" button.

Step 2: Clone your fork

You've successfully forked the Spoon-Knife repository, but so far it only exists on GitHub. To be able to work on the project, you will need to clone it to your local machine.

Run the following code:

git clone https://github.com/username/Spoon-Knife.git# Clones your fork of the repository into the current directory in terminal

Step 3: Configure remotes

When a repository is cloned, it has a default remote called origin that points to your fork on GitHub, not the original repository it was forked from. To keep track of the original repository, you need to add another remote named upstream:

More about remotes

cd Spoon-Knife# Changes the active directory in the prompt to the newly cloned "Spoon-Knife" directory
git remote add upstream https://github.com/octocat/Spoon-Knife.git# Assigns the original repository to a remote called "upstream"
git fetch upstream# Pulls in changes not present in your local repository, without modifying your files

More Things You Can Do

You've successfully forked a repository, but get a load of these other cool things you can do:

Push commits

Once you've made some commits to a forked repository and want to push it to your forked project, you do it the same way you would with a regular repository:

More about commits

git push origin master# Pushes commits to your remote repository stored on GitHub

Pull in upstream changes

If the original repository you forked your project from gets updated, you can add those updates to your fork by running the following code:

git fetch upstream# Fetches any new changes from the original repository
git merge upstream/master# Merges any changes fetched into your working files

Set Up Git

Now that you have Git installed, it's time to configure your settings. To do this you need to open an app called Terminal.

Need a quick lesson about Terminal?

Username

First you need to tell git your name, so that it can properly label the commits you make.

git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"# Sets the default name for git to use when you commit

Email

Git saves your email address into the commits you make. We use the email address to associate your commits with your GitHub account.

git config --global user.email "your_email@example.com"# Sets the default email for git to use when you commit

Your email address for Git should be the same one associated with your GitHub account. If it is not, see this guide for help adding additional emails to your GitHub account. If you want to keep your email address hidden, this guide may be useful to you.

Overriding settings in individual repos

Password caching

The last option we need to set will tell git that you don't want to type your username and password every time you talk to a remote server.

Good to know: You need git 1.7.10 or newer to use the credential helper

To use this option, you need to turn on the credential helper so that git will save your password in memory for some time:

git config --global credential.helper cache# Set git to use the credential memory cache

By default git will cache your password for 15 minutes. You can change this if you like.

git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'# Set the cache to timeout after 1 hour (setting is in seconds)

Good to know: The credential helper only works when you clone an HTTPS repository URL. If you use the SSH repository URL instead, SSH keys are used for authentication. This guide offers help generating and using an SSH key pair.