How to keep your fork up-to-date

Let's say that I'm forking repo rails/rails. After the repo has been forked to my repository I will clone it on my local machine.

git clone [email protected]:neerajsingh0101/rails.git

Now cd rails and execute git remote -v . This is what I see.

origin [email protected]:neerajsingh0101/rails.git (fetch)
origin [email protected]:neerajsingh0101/rails.git (push)

Now I will add upstream remote by executing following command.

git remote add upstream [email protected]/rails/rails.git

After having done that when I execute git remote -v then I see

origin [email protected]:neerajsingh0101/rails.git (fetch)
origin [email protected]:neerajsingh0101/rails.git (push)
upstream git://github.com/rails/rails.git (fetch)
upstream git://github.com/rails/rails.git (push)

Now I want to make some changes to the code. After all this is why I forked the repo.

Let's say that I want to add exception handling to the forked code I have locally. Then I create a branch called exception-handling and make all your changes in this branch. The key here is to not to make any changes to master branch. I try to keep master of my forked repository in sync with the master of the original repository where I forked it.

So now let's create a branch and I will put in all my changes there.

git checkout -b exception-handling

In the Gemfile I will use this code like this

gem 'rails', github: 'neerajsingh0101/rails', branch: 'exception-handling'

A month has passed. In the meantime rails master has tons of changes. I want those changes in my exception-handling branch. In order to achieve that first I need to bring my local master up-to-date with rails master.

I need to switch to master branch and then I need to execute following commands.

git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master
git push

Now the master of forked repository is in-sync with the master of rails/rails. Now that master is up-to-date I need to pull in the changes in master in my exception-handling branch.

git checkout exception-handling
git rebase master
git push -f

Now my branch exception-handling has my fix on top of rails master.