How to Sync a Forked Repository on GitHub

1. Overview

In this quick tutorial, we’ll learn how to sync a GitHub repository with the original repository that it was forked from.

There are two methods for syncing a repository:

The first method is using GitHub’s web UI. If we enter the URL of the branch that we’ve been working on, we get the following:

To sync the branch with the original repository, we should hit “Sync fork”:

The branch starts to sync with the original repository. After that, the branch will be up to date:

We’ve successfully synced the branch with the original repository.

Another method is using the command line. To sync our fork using the command line, we should first clone it:

$ git clone https://github.com/[username]/[repository_name]

After cloning our fork, we should add a remote to the original repository. We can call it whatever we want. Let’s call it upstream:

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/[original_username]/[original_repository_name]

Now, we should fetch down all the branches from the upstream remote:

$ git fetch upstream

After that, we should switch to the branch that we want to update:

$ git checkout branch3
Branch 'branch3' set up to track remote branch 'branch3' from 'origin'.
Switched to a new branch 'branch3'

Now, we should change the base of our branch so that our new commits appear on top of the upstream repository’s master branch:

$ git rebase upstream/master
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Fast-forwarded branch3 to upstream/master.

Finally, we should push the changes to our origin repository on GitHub:

$ git push -f origin branch3

We used the -f flag to force the push to our remote repository.

In this quick tutorial, we learned how to sync a fork with its original repository using both GitHub’s web UI and the command line.