When working with git, you may want to contribute to other people’s projects and wonder which one is the best option to setup your forked repository. In this small article I will explain my configurations and how I deal with branches and remotes.

TL;DR;

In case you are too lazy to read the explanation…

• You: https://github.com/isc30/roslyn
• Base: https://github.com/microsoft/roslyn

git remote add upstream https://github.com/microsoft/roslyn
git remote set-url --push upstream no_push
git fetch upstream master
git branch master -u upstream/master

Done! check the new remote with git remote -v

Explanation

In git, forking a repository doesn’t add the base remote automatically. Remotes can have any name, but we usually use upstream and origin.

microsoft/roslyn  ----------->  isc30/roslyn
upstream                        origin

Let’s add the upstream remote using git remote add <name> <url>:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/microsoft/roslyn

After this, you can configure master branch to be taken from upstream instead of origin with the following commands:

git fetch upstream master
git branch master -u upstream/master

Specifying Readonly Access to Upstream

Some times, we want to allow pulling but not pushing to the upstream. If we don’t configure this, we can end up getting weird authentication errors when running git push.

If you have no write access to upstream, I recommend setting the push url to no_push:

git remote set-url --push upstream no_push