Forking your first GitHub repository

In yesterdays blog post, we learned how to clone a repository from GitHub. The repository we started with was the tutorial_1 repository I created for you to follow along with these lessons.

In today’s blog post, I want to explain how you can create your own version of this repository, called a fork. Once you create a fork of a repository, you can push new changes up to GitHub. The reason you have to create a fork is because the main repository is one that I manage, which your user account does not have the rights to change.

However, when you create a fork of a repository, your user account is the the owner of that forked repository. As I make new changes to the main repository, you are able to incorporate those changes into your forked version. Additionally, you are also able to request that I incorporate changes from your fork into the main repository. This is how developers collaborate when developing open source code.

So to get started, you need to go to www.github.com and create an account if you don’t have one already. Once you create an account, click on this link to see the tutorial_1 repository that I manage, the web page should look something like this.

In the upper right corner, there is a button that says “Fork”, click that button to create a fork of my tutorial_1 repository.

Once you fork the repository, you can then go and clone the original repository, any new changes will be uploaded to your fork.

In tomorrows blog post, we will start explaining how to upload changes.