When Forking is not an option for your public git repos

I’m curious if this is an everyday use case, but I need to sync a public repo to our internal github Enterprise instance.

Forking is not an option because I’m going across domains and not within github.com.

My purpose is to enable a github Action internally.

I keep having to look up the steps, so here they are!

Destination Repository

First up, we create our destination repo. I’m going to retain the same name, or else I’ll get confused; however, I’ll drop the organization name.

Bare Clone

Next, we need to bare clone our source repo.

$ git clone --bare https://github.com/widdix/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy

Push Mirror

Next, we jump into that directory and push --mirror to our new destination.

$ cd aws-cloudformation-github-deploy
$
$ git push --mirror https://git.local/ehnsw-actions/release-drafter.git

We no longer need our bare clone dir. I’ll remove this to avoid confusion in the local filesystem.

Clone New Destination

Now we can jump into our new mirrored repo, so let’s clone it.

$ git clone https://git.local/actions/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy.git

Upstream Remotes

Let’s take a look at the existing remotes.

$ git remote -v
origin  https://git.local/actions/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy.git (fetch)
origin  https://git.local/actions/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy.git (push)

To pull upstream changes, we can add our upstream public repository but disable it so we can easily pull down updates with the following commands.

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/widdix/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy.git
$ git remote set-url --push upstream DISABLE

This leaves us with the following settings

$ git remote -v
$ origin    https://git.local/actions/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy.git (fetch)
$ origin    https://git.local/actions/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy.git (push)
$ upstream  https://github.com/widdix/aws-cloudformation-github-deploy.git (fetch)
$ upstream  DISABLE (push)

Update from Upstream

When we want to sync updates from the public repository, we must perform the following commands.

$ git fetch upstream
$ git rebase upstream/master
$ git add *
$ git push

Create Releases

Finally, if the source repository uses releases, these need to be manually created in the github Enterprise Instance.

Replicate the release name to the relevant tag or commit.

Summary

This post shows how to sync a public repo to a local git instance and pull down future updates.

I hope this helps someone else.

Cheers