Fast Forward Your Fork
Since forking a repository is so easy on GitHub, a number of people tend to do it thinking they want to play with the source, but then never actually push…
Since forking a repository is so easy on GitHub, a number of people tend to do it thinking they want to play with the source, but then never actually push back into their fork. Meanwhile, development continues on the main branch, and it’s a little annoying to have to add them as a remote and merge in order to get back up to date. So, we’ve added a new button to your repository details that will show up if you forked a project, didn’t push to it, and the source repo has moved on:

If you click on ‘Fast Forward’, it will move all your branches up to wherever the repository you originally forked from now is. Now all of those of you who forked Rails months ago and never did anything with it and are thinking of trying again, go forth and Fast Forward.
Written by
Related posts
What’s coming to our GitHub Actions 2026 security roadmap
A look at GitHub Actions’ 2026 roadmap, outlining how secure defaults, policy controls, and CI/CD observability harden the software supply chain end to end.
Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy
From April 24 onward, interaction data—specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context—from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users will be used to train and improve our AI models unless they opt out.
GitHub availability report: February 2026
In February, we experienced six incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.