Forking • GitHub & Git Foundations

Forking is the safe foundation

to contributing to any
open source project.

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Welcome to another episode
of Git and GitHub Foundations on forking.

Forking is the act of taking
your repository and copying it

under your own account.

Now this act of copying
allows you to safely make changes

essentially in a sandbox.

This works both on the open source model

as well as an open company model,

greatly expanding the number of employees

that contribute to a project.

When we see a project
that we'd like to contribute to,

we click the Fork button to make a copy
of that into our own account

and then begin to make our own changes.

The appropriate step
is to create a branch

on that forked copy

so that there's a name,
label and container

for the potential contribution
that we'll later make

to the original repo.

Once this is under your account
there's some metadata there

that shows who owns
the original copy of this project,

and you can also see who else
has maybe forked this project as well.

The network graph supplements that
with metadata down to the commit level

seeing what work people are doing
in the repositories.

All of this is a preparatory step

for offering your changes back
to the original project owner

through the mechanism
of a Pull Request.

Thanks for watching another episode
of Git and GitHub Foundations on forking.

As always, don't forget to click
subscribe over on the side,

or leave us questions
or comments down below,

or see some of these other
educational videos

especially the one on Pull Requests.

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