Merge Upstream Pull Request into Your Fork

Use Case

I have forked a repo, I’ve made some changes and my fork and upstream diverged.

In the meantime someone sent a PR to upstream and this PR is still open or rejected/closed etc by maintainers. However I’d like to apply the changes that PR proposes into my fork.

Solutions

One Time

If this is a one time thing, then you can get with fetch:

$ git fetch upstream pull/42/head

Then you can merge, cherry-pick etc. these PR changes.

Or you can pull directly:

$ git pull upstream pull/42/head

Git Alias

If you regularly will apply PRs then you can add related functions as aliases in your local or global config, a.k.a one of the below:

• ${YOUR_REPO}/.git/config (local)
• ~/.gitconfig (global)
• ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/git/config (global)

# ${REPO}/.git/config
# ~/.gitconfig
# ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/git/config
[alias]
    gfpr = "!f() { git fetch upstream refs/pull/$1/head:pr/$1; } ; f"
    gppr = "!f() { git pull upstream pull/$1/head; } ; f"

Then fetch all PRs.

$ git fetch upstream

To check out a particular PR #42:

$ git checkout pr/42
Branch pr/42 set up to track remote branch pr/42 from upstream.
Switched to a new branch 'pr/42'

Local gitconfig

You can append fetch config in your local config.

1
2
3
4
5

# .git/config
[remote "upstream"]
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
	url = [email protected]:joyent/node.git
	fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/*

The rest is the same as above.

With Script

You can append above related fetch config with below script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

git remote -v | grep fetch | grep github | \
    while read remote url _; do
        if ! git config --get-all "remote.$remote.fetch" | grep -q refs/pull
        then
            git config --add "remote.$remote.fetch" \
                '+refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/'"$remote"'/pull/*'
        fi
    done

The rest is the same.

All done!

Resources:

• gist #1
• gist #2