Merge git forked repo with upstream changes

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I forked Phlow’s excellent “Feeling Responsive” repository about a month ago, to create this website. I hacked away at config files, added posts, and deleted demo data.

Since I’d starred Phlow’s repo on GitHub, I noticed that he was continuing to commit fixes and improvements (after I’d forked the repo), and I wanted to incorporate those fixes into my fork, without having to worry about all my changes conflicting with the original demo content.

I tried to get my head around git rebase, but that although I found some useful instructions, I don’t think I’ve entirely understood how this is supposed ot work.

Instead, I managed to use git merge with great success, by doing the following:

  1. Add upstream repo as a remote:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/Phlow/feeling-responsive.git

  1. “Fetch” the upstream repo (I guess this creates a local copy of the upstream repo’s commits)

git fetch upstream

  1. “Merge” the upstream repo it really was as simple as git merge upstream/gh-pages

I ended up with two conflicts:

[david:~/Documents/Projects/blog] test_merge ± git merge upstream/gh-pages
Auto-merging pages/documentation.md
CONFLICT (modify/delete): pages/changelog.md deleted in HEAD and modified in upstream/gh-pages. Version upstream/gh-pages of pages/changelog.md left in tree.
Auto-merging index.md
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in index.md
Removing assets/img/windows-8-tile-icon-144x.png
Removing assets/img/touch-icon-iphone-retina-120x.png
Removing assets/img/touch-icon-iphone-60x.png
Removing assets/img/touch-icon-ipad-retina-152x.png
Removing assets/img/touch-icon-ipad-76x.png
Removing assets/img/touch-icon-android-152x.png
Removing assets/img/favicon-32x.png
Auto-merging _drafts/design/2015-10-11-no-header.md
Auto-merging _drafts/design/2014-09-10-portfolio.md
Auto-merging _config.yml
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in _config.yml
Auto-merging README.md
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
[david:~/Documents/Projects/blog] test_merge(+42/-0) 1 ± git status
On branch test_merge
You have unmerged paths.
  (fix conflicts and run "git commit")

I ran git status to identify any issues which needed fixing, and manually resolved 2 minor conflicts. I used git rm to delete a file I’d already deleted in my local repo.

After git status reported no more issues (just files which were going to be added / deleted / changed), I was able to run git commit -m 'merged with upstream', and successfully merged all the upstream goodness!