Private Fork of Git Repo

I find myself creating a private fork of public repositories rather frequently. There are a variety of benefits to this over just create a public fork and working there, but that's not what this post is about. I have found two solutions to this problem, which I will go over in this post.

git-private-fork

The first solution works when making a private fork of any git repository:

# Clone the version control data of the public repository.
git clone --bare ${PUBLIC_REPO} ${PUBLIC_REPO_DIR}

# Enter the cloned directory
cd ${PUBLIC_REPO_DIR}

# Push an exact copy of the git repository.
git push --mirror ${PRIVATE_REPO}

# Leave the cloned directory
popd

# Clean up.
rm -rf ${PUBLIC_REPO_DIR}

git clone ${PRIVATE_REPO} ${PRIVATE_REPO_DIR}

if [ ! -z ${SET_UPSTREAM+x} ] ; then
    pushd ${PRIVATE_REPO_DIR}
    git remote add upstream ${PUBLIC_REPO}
    git remote set-url --push upstream DISABLE
    popd
fi

I will usually go ahead and set the public repo as my upstream too:

git remote add upstream ${PUBLIC_REPO}
git remote set-url --push upstream DISABLE

You can find this solution with some other little improvements at github.com/tommymcm/git-tools/. Feel free to open any issues/PRs there.

GitHub Import

There is one known issue though, which comes up when forking rather large repositories (like llvm/llvm-project). For large repositories, you may hit single-push limits (2GiB on GitHub). I have toyed around with making a general-purpose solution in git-private-fork, but I couldn't ever get one that handled all the edge cases (rate-limits, size-limits, granularity).

Instead of fixing that, I typically just fallback to importing the repository on GitHub. Disclaimer, that I don't know of a solution for other hosts like gitlab or codeberg because I don't use them. I'd assume they have a similar feature though.

To create your private fork by importing, go to github.com/new/import. It's self explanatory.

Disclaimer, this is a pretty slow process for large repositories. However, it's the perfect thing to run while you go grab lunch, or write a blog post.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank 0xjac and ConfoundingVariables on GitHub for providing the original solutions in a Gist and the comments.