How to Sync Your GitHub Fork: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you’ve forked a repository on GitHub, it’s important to keep your fork up-to-date with the original (or “upstream”) repository. This ensures you have the latest changes and can continue contributing to the project. In this article, we’ll walk through two methods for syncing your forked repo using GitHub’s web interface.

Syncing Your Fork on GitHub.com
To update your fork on GitHub.com, follow these steps:

Navigate to the main page of your forked repository on GitHub.com (e.g. https://github.com/your-username/example-repository).

Click on the “New pull request” button to begin the pull request process.

On the new page, choose your fork as the “base fork” and the original repository (e.g. the one you forked from) as the “head fork”. Important: You need to click on “compare across forks” to be able to select the base and head forks appropriately.

Then, click on “Create pull request”.

On the next page, click on “Create pull request” once more to finish creating the pull request.

This will create a pull request that compares your fork with the original repository. When you create this pull request, you’ll see which files will be updated in your fork.

Merging the Pull Request

After creating the pull request, you need to merge it so that the changes in the original repository are merged into your fork:

Open the pull request if it’s not already open on GitHub.

Click on the green “Merge pull request” button at the bottom of the pull request page.

Click on the “Confirm merge” button.

Once you’ve confirmed the merge, all of the changes from the original repository will be in your fork. When you return to your fork on GitHub.com, you’ll see the changes that you just merged.

Keep in mind that when you update your fork using a reverse pull request on GitHub.com, you’ll need to update your local files as well. You can do this by syncing your local repository with the updated fork.