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
The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we’re taking to improve reliability.
Your guide to GitHub Universe 2026 is here: The schedule just launched!
The GitHub Universe session catalog is live. Explore interactive workshops, community talks, demos, and panels. Plus, register before August 19 to save $300.
GitHub availability report: July 2026
In July, we experienced eight incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.