Hello Fellow CodeNewbies ๐,
I am collaborating with a friend to create a project in React.
I created a repo for the project, and my teammate forked this repo.
Background
Recently, I created a branch to make some changes. Then I pushed this branch to the remote repo and created a pull request.
I asked my teammate to fetch this branch and test things out locally before merging it into the main
branch.
After making sure that we didn't have anything to fetch and merge from the remote repo, and after several attempts, we still couldn't fetch the branch from the remote repo.
We mostly got the error of fatal: couldn't find remote ref <branch-name>
.
Then we tried to step back and figure things out.
From my teammate's side, my repo is the upstream
repo. He then forked this repo, which automatically becomes his origin
repo.
For him to fetch a branch โ that hasn't been merged to main
โ from the upstream
repo, his origin
repo should have access to the upstream
.
So, we need to set the origin
repo to point to the upstream
repo.
๐ Important Side Notes
My teammate and I started this project with one of us creating a repo and the other forking the repo.
But for collaborating, we could do it differently, which I will cover in another blog post.
We found out later that what we're doing is an open-source workflow, where we maintain and contribute to a repo. In this case, I am the maintainer, and my teammate is the contributor.
However, we learned a lot from this accident.
So, I hope you can gain something too from our journey! ๐
Fetch a branch from the upstream
repo
Check our current configured remote repo for our fork.
git remote -v
If we haven't configured a remote that points to the
upstream
repo, we will get:origin <fork-repo-url> (fetch) origin <fork-repo-url> (push)
Add a new remote
upstream
repo that will be synced with theorigin
repo.git remote add upstream <original-repo-url>
original-repo-url
is the HTTPS URL of the repo that we fork.
We can copy this link by going to the repo on GitHub, clicking the green button with "Code" written on it, and copying the HTTPS link.Check if the new
upstream
has now been added.git remote -v
Now we should get:
origin <fork-repo-url> (fetch) origin <fork-repo-url> (push) upstream <original-repo-url> (fetch) upstream <original-repo-url> (push)
Fetch data from the
upstream
.git fetch upstream
You will see in the command line that we have fetched the branches on the
upstream
repo, including the target branch.Navigate to the branch.
git checkout branch-name
Running this command will automatically create a branch with the same name in our local repo.
Now you have the branch on your local repo, and you can test it out locally! ๐
Thank you for reading!
Last but not least, you can find me on Twitter. Let's connect! ๐