What is the difference between Forking and Cloning on GitHub

Question

I d like to know the differences between doing a Fork of a project and doing a clone of it   Can I only send pull requests via GitHub if I ve forked a project

User · Answer

In case you did what the questioner hinted at  forgot to fork and just locally cloned a repo  made changes and now need to issue a pull request  you can get back on track    fork the repo you want to send pull request to push your local changes to your remote issue pull request

User · Answer

Forked project is on your online repository  repo    Cloned project is on your local machine  I usually clone after forking the repo     You can commit on your online repo  or commit on your local repo and then push to your online repo   then send pull request    Project manager can accept it to get your changes in his main online version

User · Answer

Basically  yes  A fork is just a request for GitHub to clone the project and registers it under your username  GitHub also keeps track of the relationship between the two repositories  so you can visualize the commits and pulls between the two projects  and other forks    You can still request that people pull from your cloned repository  even if you don t use fork -- but you d have to deal with making it publicly available yourself  Or send the developers patches  see git format-patch  that they can apply to their trees

User · Answer

Another weird subtle difference on GitHub is that changes to forks are not counted in your activity log until your changes are pulled into the original repo  What s more  to change a fork into a proper clone  you have to contact Github support  apparently   From Why are my contributions not showing up      Commit was made in a fork      Commits made in a fork will not count toward your contributions  To make them count  you must do one of the following       Open a pull request to have your changes merged into the parent repository    To detach the fork and turn it into a standalone repository on GitHub  contact GitHub Support  If the fork has forks of its own  let support know if the forks should move with your repository into a new network or remain in the current network  For more information  see  About forks

User · Answer

A clone is where you have proper duplication  and separation between  two  possibly different  versions of a repository  When one repo is amended  the new content must be actively copied to the other repo using a push command  And changes in the other repo fetched   When you fork a repo  on a server  there is no need for duplication of content because both repos will use the same  fixed object  content from that same server  The  trick  is in managing the different user viewpoints so that each user believes they have a full personal copy of the repo  Pushes and fetches between forks is simply updates the user s pointers   At a lower level  git does the same thing internally  If you have three different files  each containing Hello World  then git simply  forks  its single copy of the Hello World blob and offers it up in each of the three places as required   The ability to fork on the server means that Github s large storage allowance isn t that big on average as every body shares the one single underlying repo

User · Answer

In a nutshell   fork  creates a copy of the project hosted on your own GitHub account    Clone  uses git software on your computer to download the source code and it s entire version history unto that computer

User · Answer

When you say you are Forking a repository you are basically creating a copy of the repository under your GitHub ID  The main point to note here is that any changes made to the original repository will be reflected back to your forked repositories you need to fetch and rebase   However  if you make any changes to your forked repository you will have to explicitly create a pull request to the original repository  If your pull request is approved by the administrator of the original repository  then your changes will be committed merged with the existing original code-base  Until then  your changes will be reflected only in the copy you forked    In short   The Fork  amp  Pull Model lets anyone fork an existing repository and push changes to their personal fork without requiring access be granted to the source repository  The changes must then be pulled into the source repository by the project maintainer    Note that after forking you can clone your repository  the one under your name  locally on your machine  Make changes in it and push it to your forked repository  However  to reflect your changes in the original repository your pull request must be approved   Couple of other interesting dicussions -   Are git forks actually git clones   How do I update a GitHub forked repository

User · Answer

In a nutshell  Forking is perhaps the same as  cloning under your GitHub ID profile   A fork is anytime better than a clone  with a few exceptions  obviously  The forked repository is always being monitored compared with the original repository unlike a cloned repository  That enables you to track the changes  initiate pull requests and also manually sync the changes made in the original repository with your forked one

User · Answer

While  AniketThakur s answer is very good  No one has answered the following question yet      Can I only send pull requests via GitHub if I ve forked a project    No   If you are a contributor to a repository  you can   Make a local clone   Make a local branch  Add commits to that branch  Push the local branch back to github  creating a remote branch in the process   Make a pull request requesting for that branch to be merged into the master branch  or whatever branch you like

[git] What is the difference between Forking and Cloning on GitHub?

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