Question

We asked students in our class to use github to keep all their course project code. Each student created his repo. (I guess I should have created the repo and created teams and it was my mistake). I then forked each of those repos under my organization.

I thought that I could simple pull the changes as and when students update their original repo. I think my understanding of how the pull works is wrong.

In the following image I can see that student has updated his repo with some new documents but is there any way I can simply update the repo I have forked ?

Answer 1

Assuming you have a central repository, you need to update your forked repo, simply add the source repository as a remote and then use a standard git pull. You can then push those changes to your forked repo.

There are two options to easily update your fork:

Option 1

Merge the upstream repo into your own…

# Add the remote, call it "upstream":

git remote add upstream git://github.com/whoever/whatever.git

# Make sure that you're on your master branch:

git checkout master

# Merge the upstream master branch to your master branch

git pull upstream master

# Now push your changes to your forked repository on github

git push origin master

Option 2:

Alternatively, you could use rebase to update your fork…

# Add the remote, call it "upstream":

git remote add upstream git://github.com/whoever/whatever.git

# Fetch all the branches of that remote into remote-tracking branches,
# such as upstream/master:

git fetch upstream

# Make sure that you're on your master branch:

git checkout master

# Rewrite your master branch so that any commits of yours that
# aren't already in upstream/master are replayed on top of that
# other branch:

git rebase upstream/master

# Now push your changes to your forked repo on github...

git push origin master

Github has detailed documentation on working with forked repositories: Github: Fork a Repo