Set up your fork

First follow the instructions for Making your own copy (fork) of ODL.

Overview

$ git clone git@github.com:your-user-name/odl.git
$ cd odl
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/odlgroup/odl.git

In detail

Clone your fork

1. Clone your fork to the local computer with

   $ git clone git@github.com:your-user-name/odl.git
   

2. Investigate. Change directory to your new repo: cd odl. Then git branch -a to show you all branches. You’ll get something like this:

   * master
   remotes/origin/master
   

   This tells you that you are currently on the master branch, and that you also have a remote connection to origin/master. What remote repository is remote/origin? Try git remote -v to see the URLs for the remote. They will point to your GitHub fork.

   Now you want to connect to the upstream ODL GitHub repository, so you can merge in changes from trunk.

Linking your repository to the upstream repo

$ cd odl
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/odlgroup/odl.git

upstream here is just the arbitrary name we’re using to refer to the main ODL repository at ODL GitHub.

Note that we’ve used https:// for the URL rather than git@. The https:// URL is read-only. This means we that we can’t accidentally (or deliberately) write to the upstream repo, and we are only going to use it to merge into our own code.

Just for your own satisfaction, show yourself that you now have a new “remote”, with git remote -v show, giving you something like:

upstream     https://github.com/odlgroup/odl.git (fetch)
upstream     https://github.com/odlgroup/odl.git (push)
origin       git@github.com:your-user-name/odl.git (fetch)
origin       git@github.com:your-user-name/odl.git (push)