Is there a way to know who has forked my repository on GitHub? I can see the number of forks, but I'd like to know who forked my repository and what kind of changes they made to it.
I know they can send me a pull request if they're interested in contributing back to my repository, but is there some other way for me to find out who forked my repository?
Clicking the number of forks shows you the full network. From there you can click "members" to see who forked the repo. Example for ExpressJS: https://github.com/expressjs/express/network/members.
now you can check the forks in Insights -> Forks
One way I discovered from the browser is attempting to create a pull request and then compare across forks. All the existing forks would show up.
The accepted answer above helps to see the accounts who forked the repository. In order to meet the other requirement, i.e. see what kind of changes have been made you will need to go to each individual forked repository and then see the compare tab (please refer to the attached picture). To see exact details on what files have been actually changed you should click on the compare button shown in the image.
The above process is the right way and can be tedious. In case you want to see the summarized information of how ahead or behind is each forked repository you may use the link https://forkinfo.herokuapp.com/, which I have open sourced here in case you want to edit it as per any specific requirements. It fetches information about how much a fork is ahead or behind the parent fork, by getting that information from homepage of each forked repository (from the part highlighted in the image). This information is generated based on comparison of repositories
Related
I am newbie in GitHub. I wonder why the option "Fork" is there when I have the option of cloning others' project and make my own repository on GitHub to extend it?
I guess the best answer I can think of is you might want to bring the fork back into the original branch, hence keeping it in the same repository.
I believe Forks were designed for playing with ideas or for suggesting changes to the owner of the repository, heres a link about it:
Github Forks
Yes, you are right, you can clone another repo and do any desired stuff.
But after that you need merge your updates into original repo (share your improvements with whole world) - and exactly for this purposes you need fork.
As far as I know, only this is the most flexible way manage your updates with original repo. And only this way can avoid undesired commit into original repo (repo owner able manage all propositions about any changes).
I have fork-ed a project on an organisation I'm part of. I'm trying to get the fork updated as there were commits (see below) just by using the web interface.
I've searched the net but I did not find anything relevant.
How can I do that?
Thanks
As i've never played with someone's branch before, my question sounds stupid but bear in mind : This was my first time.
Please find the way to update the branch you've forked , when that person who own the branch, committed changes and you want your fork to be the same as his branch. All done by Github's web interface
Go to the pull request tab
Click on the button New pull request
Create a pull request
Commit (as you are asking for his changes willingly, you are the one committing :))
I want to fork a github project to fix a couple of issues and then send a pull request.
The problem I'm running into is that I've already forked the project to adapt it for another user base.
Is it possible to create a second fork? If so, how?
When I try to fork now it just takes me to the previously created fork.
There is no way to have two forks of the same GitHub project unless you use two different GitHub accounts.
So:
Create a separate GitHub account (and verify the email)
Fork the
project
Invite your main GitHub account as a "Collaborator" (from
the settings)
You may need to add the extra step of creating an organization with the new GitHub account and inviting your main github account as an owner of the organization (also make sure your new fork is in that new organization). This will let you do things like deploy automatically to a Heroku app that is connected to your main GitHub account.
Why can't we just have multiple forks???
I mean that I could just commit and push without making a pull request, but I want to do it the offical way and I want somebody else to review the changes before I push to a public project.
GitHub pull requests do not need to be submitted from a fork; they work within a single repository as well:
Pull requests are especially useful in the fork & pull model because they provide a way to notify project maintainers about changes in your fork. However, they're also useful in the shared repository model where they're used to initiate code review and general discussion about a set of changes before being merged into a mainline branch.
There's nothing stopping you from creating a pull request even if you don't technically have to. This is often considered a best practice, and GitHub's own Flow model is largely based on pull requests.
Creating a pull request within a single repository is very similar to creating one from a fork:
Create a feature branch and push your work to that branch on GitHub
In the GitHub web UI, switch to your feature branch
Click the "Compare" & review button
The trick is not to use the master branch to create pull requests. Then you won't need to create multiple forks since you can make as many branches as you need and make pull requests against each branch independently.
Given a clean forked repo, create a dedicated branch and use that branch for the pull request.
You can create branches from the web UI (although it is not obvious).
Click the branch selection dropdown, type the new branch name in the input field, and then you'll see a clickable link Create branch: <new-branch-name> as shown below. The tricky UI part is that it might not be very obvious you should click the "create branch: xyz..." — it is NOT displayed as a button or as a hyperlink, and there is NO indication that this is a clickable link. Moreover, there is NO hint whatsoever that a branch can be created until you type in the search box — anyone would probably assume that the search box is used exclusively for searching branches, and not for creating them.
In case you already made changes directly in your fork's master branch then consider moving those changes into a dedicated branch and hard resetting the master branch to the original remote so that you keep it clean for synching with the upstream repo.
See also:
https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests/creating-and-deleting-branches-within-your-repository
The best way, recommended by github manual, is use command line git, mirror clone your repo and push it to your github.
https://docs.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositories/duplicating-a-repository
If you strongly prefer GitHub web interface to the command line, a GUI friendly workaround is create a new organization and fork to that new organization.
Another GUI way I can think of is to declare a fork as a template repo using repo's setting so you can create as many forks as you need.
I know that the owner of a repo is able to see a fork request when one is performed. But what about a clone? Can the owner of the repo see when someone clones it?
The question is too general, but let me answer the question as it stands now.
Can the owner of the repo see when someone clones it?
No, they cannot. If I go to one of your repositories and clone it to my local hard drive, the owner will not be able to view that activity. And why would you want to? Likely there are many clones of your repository.
Know that clones can live on other systems than GitHub.
Now, will the owner know that someone forked their repository on GitHub itself?
Yes, they will, assuming they pay attention.
I did the following:
Logged in as my main account
Created a repository
Set up a new dummy-account on an alternate email address
Forked the repository I created earlier
Logged back into my main account
This is what I see on my first page after logging in:
If I do the following:
Click on my repository
Click on the small 1 to the right of the "Fork" button:
Click on the "Members" tab:
Then I see this:
Conclusion:
Yes, the owner of a repository will see when someone makes a fork on GitHub, but no, they will not see it when someone makes a clone somewhere else.
As far what I found you CAN'T know when someone clones it (if you mean exact time) nor who cloned it.
But you can know how many clones were made on which date and the number of unique cloners from ths url.
https://github.com/{usernamme}/{reponame}/graphs/traffic
Insights tab:
However one thing I find fishy is unique cloners is more than unique visitors, how can someone decide to clone even without visiting the repo. I guess it may be bots in such cases.
You can use clone graph on GitHub to find out how many times your repository's source code is actually cloned in a given day. More information can be found here https://help.github.com/articles/about-repository-graphs/#traffic
Yes, it can be done.
Go to your account landing page- https://github.com/yourusername
Click on the repo you want to check traffic for.
Click on Insights on top navigation bar.
Click on Traffic on left navigation bar.
Voila, you will get your traffic including no of clones with a timeline.
Reference: clone graph
Open Github, find your repo, click on it. Then click on Insights and finally click on Traffic. Github shows a graph Traffic including git clones. Salutes!
As for now we can obtain this information with Rest API /audit-log,
but it is available only for Enterprise users with org:read permission.
We can see the actual users that have preformed fetch, clone and many more actions.
https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/orgs#get-the-audit-log-for-an-organization
as long as you have access to the repo, aka an ssh key on the filesystem with the remote, then yes. you would do as follows:
git fetch some_remote
git log some_remote/some_branch
I've previously forked jockm/vert.x and sent him a pull request. Now I want to fork vert-x/vert.x (the upstream of jockm/vert.x) and send them a different pull request. But when I click the Fork button, unsuprisingly I end up in my tjcrowder/vert.x fork of jockm/vert.x instead. Is it possible to fork both vert-x/vert.x and jockm/vert.x simultaneously such that I can send each pull requests as appropriate?
I fear the answer may be the same as for this question about the converse situation ("there's no GitHub way, but you can add a remote repo") but I'm hoping otherwise — not least because I don't see how the answer there would allow me to send pull requests to the new remote.
There's no GitHub way (small lie, see below), but there's also nothing to fear.
By definition, your fork of a fork is a fork of the original.
When you open a pull request, you get the option to choose both the origin and the destination for your pull request. The choices available there obviously depend on the fork graph, but as long as there is a path in the graph between the 2 repositories, you should be safe.
Also, since pull requests live on the website side, you don't even need to add a remote as long as you don't want to use it from git.
Now of course, you might want to reconsider your place in that graph, and make yourself a direct child of the real upstream, but that's mostly unrelated.
As said earlier there is actually a twisted way to have multiple forks, which is to create organizations and fork in them. That way you can "own" multiple repositories in the same graph. But there's really no need to go there.
Thanks to sigma's answer, I saw that not only is the upstream repo available when I go to do a pull request on the jockm/vert.x repo, but all other forks of the upstream repo are as well. So what I ended up doing was:
Deleting my fork of jockm/vert.x and instead forking vert-x/vert.x, since mostly I want to work within the main upstream repo, not jockm's version.
Creating a branch for the commit I wanted to send to jockm, and a separate branch for the commit I wanted to send to vert-x.
Making the relevant changes to each branch.
Sending pull requests for each branch to the relevant repos, since the jockm/vert.x repo is listed as a possible target for the request (along with about 200 other forks).
I used separate branches (basically topic branches) so that those commits would remain the only thing in those pull requests, since subsequent commits on the same branch are automatically added to the pull request, and these changes needed to remain isolated until/unless merged.
It seems like the better option would be to create a branch on your fork, and create a pull request from that branch. You can use branches to "fork" your version
I didn't see any specifics on "multiple forks", so I would probably end up creating another GitHub account, under which I would do the second clone, and send the different pull request to vert.x/vert.x.
Since you can have "Multiple github accounts on the same computer" (with the right ssh config file, also described here), it is a possible workaround.
Note that, however, this is supported by GitLab, with GitLab 14.0 (June 2021):
Edit default path and project name when forking
Edit default path and project name when forking
Forking a project enables you to have an exact copy of an original repository where you can experiment, apply changes, and submit contributions to the parent project.
Your forks should have meaningful names that explain their goals, and if your project is diverging, you may need multiple forks of a single project.
In this release, GitLab now supports editing the project name and project slug directly when you create a fork.
You can now create multiple forks of the same project, each with a different name, all in the same group!
See Documentation and Issue.
You could also just create a new Organization under your profile/settings. Then you can fork different states of the same original repo through the same account.