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
Why developers still flock to Python: Guido van Rossum on readability, AI, and the future of programming
Discover how Python changed developer culture—and see why it keeps evolving.
Developers still need the right to challenge junk patents
Calling on developers, startups, and open source organizations to advocate against patent rules that would make it harder to challenge bad patents by the December 2 deadline.
GitHub Availability Report: October 2025
In October, we experienced four incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.