How to turn a git branch into fork?

Question

I have created a branch in my GitHub repo: https://github.com/markmnl/FalconUDP, so there are now two branches: "master" and "single-threaded". I realise now I will never want to merge "single-threaded" back into "master" and want to maintain each branch separately independently of one another, though from time-to-time I will want to cherry pick bits of code from one into the other.

It would be disastrous should the branches be accidentally merged (though not catastrophic of course since I can always go back - it being in source control).

It strikes me what I should have done is fork the project into another repo. (That way I can still do the cherry picking with Pull Requests).

What should I do now?

Answer 1

I guess your question is specifically: how to create a fork of your own project in the same user account in GitHub. You cannot use the user interface of the website, but you can create a new repository and push the relevant branches to it:

1. Create new repo, completely empty, without even a README https://github.com/new

2. Add the new repo as a new remote in your local clone of the original project, let's call this remote fork for example:

   git remote add fork NEW_REPO_URL
   

3. Push your single-threaded branch to it:

   git push -u fork single-threaded
   

4. Delete this branch from the original project, assuming your remote is called origin:

   git push origin :single-threaded
   

Answer 2

Here's how I would do it:

1. Fork FalconUDP into a new repository (using the fork feature on GitHub)
2. Clone the new repository (FalconUDP-st?) locally
3. merge the single-threaded branch back into master
4. delete the single-threaded branch
5. push back to FalconUDP-st on GitHub

You can issue pull requests on the GitHub website, or you can just cherry pick across your local clones.

Answer 3

If you really want to fork, the way would be:

1. Clone FalconUDP
2. in the clone, checkout single-threaded branch

Now you have two options:

a) new remote repo

1. Create new repo
2. Add it as remote to cloned repo, call it, let's say "new-remote"
3. git push single-threaded new-remote/master
4. New repo has contents of single-threaded as master

b) Local repo

1. delete branch master
2. checkout from branch single-threaded into new branch master