Colaborating in Git with more than one branch

• Author: Fernando A. Damião <me@fadamiao.com>
• Revisor: André Boutros <andre.boutros@hotmail.com>
• Created At: 2014-04-24
• Last Update: 2014-05-21

Some open source projects in sites like GitHub have rules to contributions, most of them have a rule to create a separate branch from master to contribute.

When I contribute to GitHub's Training Kit, they already have a specific branch to receive the contribution, and I have some difficulties working in my fork with this "remote" branch.

So in this scenario I have:

• The project repository: https://github.com/github/training-kit
• My Fork: https://github.com/fadamiao/training-kit
• The branch I want to contribute: cheat-sheet-pt

Fork and clone the repository (if you did not do this before):

$ git clone git@github.com:fadamiao/training-kit.git

Now you need to create a new remote, named upstream, with the project repository URL:

$ git remote add upstream git@github.com:github/training-kit.git

With the remote of the project added to your local repository, update all the infos of the repository:

$ git fetch upstream

Now you are able to change to the branch and work on them:

$ git checkout -b cheat-sheet-pt upstream/cheat-sheet-pt

This command creates a new branch with the same history as upstream.

Keep the fork updated

To keep the fork updated, you need to merge the upstream infos with your branch:

$ git pull upstream master

Some people like use git rebase instead of git pull, but I like git pull =P

If you want you can update your fork by sending a git push:

$ git push origin master

References

These links help me understand and solve this:

• Keeping A GitHub Fork Updated
• git checkout remote branch - Stack Overflow