1 What is a fork?

GitHub is useful for developing your own code, but at some point you might want to collaborate with other people on a project. Or you might come across a GitHub repository that you want to use as a starting point for your own work. In both cases forks are the way to go.

A fork is a copy of somebody’s GitHub repository. You can fork a repo and work independently of the original project. Or if you are collaborating with other people you can stay connected with the original repository via pull requests.

However, you cannot directly affect (or damage) the original project, which is somewhat less scary, right?

1.1 The workflow

To understand the workflow, let’s see how Angelina and Kingsley collaborate using GitHub (see Figure 1.1).

Kingsley owns a GitHub repo. Angelina forks this repo (1) and then clones is to her computer (2). Angelina develops code using branches and makes commits (3). Then she pushes these changes to her remote repo on GitHub (4) and makes a pull request to the original repo, which Kingsley merges (5).

From now on Angelina will fetch (6) and merge (7) the newest changes from upstream into her local repo and continue the workflow (3-5).