I've got a project hosted on GitHub which somebody has forked. On their fork, they've created a new branch "foo" and made some changes. How do I pull their "foo" into a new branch also named "foo" in my repo?
I understand they could submit a pull request to me, but I'd like to initiate this process myself.
Assume the following:
This question is related to
git
github
git-branch
git-pull
git-remote
If antak's answer:
git fetch [email protected]:<THEIR USERNAME>/<REPO>.git <THEIR BRANCH>:<OUR NAME FOR BRANCH>
gives you:
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
Then (following Przemek D's advice) use
git fetch https://github.com/<THEIR USERNAME>/<REPO>.git <THEIR BRANCH>:<OUR NAME FOR BRANCH>
GitHub has a new option relative to the preceding answers, just copy/paste the command lines from the PR:
Merge
or Squash and merge
buttonview command line instructions
The following is a nice expedient solution that works with GitHub for checking out the PR branch from another user's fork. You need to know the pull request ID (which GitHub displays along with the PR title).
Example:
Fixing your insecure code #8
alice wants to merge 1 commit into your_repo:master
from her_repo:branch
git checkout -b <branch>
git pull origin pull/8/head
Substitute your remote if different from origin
.
Substitute 8
with the correct pull request ID.
No, you don't need to add them as a remote. That would be clumbersome and a pain to do each time.
git fetch [email protected]:theirusername/reponame.git theirbranch:ournameforbranch
This creates a local branch named ournameforbranch
which is exactly the same as what theirbranch
was for them. For the question example, the last argument would be foo:foo
.
Note :ournameforbranch
part can be further left off if thinking up a name that doesn't conflict with one of your own branches is bothersome. In that case, a reference called FETCH_HEAD
is available. You can git log FETCH_HEAD
to see their commits then do things like cherry-picked
to cherry pick their commits.
Oftentimes, you want to fix something of theirs and push it right back. That's possible too:
git fetch [email protected]:theirusername/reponame.git theirbranch
git checkout FETCH_HEAD
# fix fix fix
git push [email protected]:theirusername/reponame.git HEAD:theirbranch
If working in detached state worries you, by all means create a branch using :ournameforbranch
and replace FETCH_HEAD
and HEAD
above with ournameforbranch
.
If the forked repo is protected so you can't push directly into it, and your goal is to make changes to their foo, then you need to get their branch foo into your repo like so:
git remote add protected_repo https://github.com/theirusername/their_repo.git
git fetch protected_repo
git checkout --no-track protected_repo/foo
Now you have a local copy of foo with no upstream associated to it. You can commit changes to it (or not) and then push your foo to your own remote repo.
git push --set-upstream origin foo
Now foo is in your repo on GitHub and your local foo is tracking it. If they continue to make changes to foo you can fetch theirs and merge into your foo.
git checkout foo
git fetch protected_repo
git merge protected_repo/foo
Source: Stackoverflow.com