Question

I’m having troubles phrasing this clearly, but I’ll give it a shot.

Situation:

• I forked a Repository as my master then cloned it locally.
• Made my changes, and sent a pull request.
• The pull request has been closed, and has been “added manually”
  (patch and apply).

Question:

• How do I get my local (and remote) repository back in sync with the upstream project?

---

• I don’t care about keeping minor differences.
• I want my code to be easily pulled in the future.
• I don’t want to lose history (mine or upstreams).
• Will the solution cause me issues with developing in the future?

Alternatives:

• is there an easier way?
• Should I just rename this branch (somehow) and start afresh?
• • (somehow) sync the rename locally and work from a new master?
• • Should I now forget using branches named master as this will cause me issues?

Github’s in question:

• Original Upstream “pull”
• My Repository

Answer 1

Well, the easiest thing if you don’t want to lose your history is to always create a feature branch where you work on your pull request.

In your case (if you want to keep your history), create a new branch

git checkout master
git checkout -b my-old-feature

Then, just reset your master branch to whatever point is the upstream master branch

git remote add upstream <upstream-repo-uri>
git fetch upstream
git checkout master
git reset --hard upstream/master

There you then have a clean state and your master branch will be exactly the upstream one. In the future, just always keep master branch following the upstream/master one, and work on feature branch you create to prevent collision with upstream updates.

edit:
By the way, I always prefer to have my branches named the same as the upstream. But you can also track upstream/master on another branch name. For example:

git pull upstream master:upstream-master

Hope this help!