Overview

Teaching: 25 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How can I make changes to a repo I don’t have write access to?

Objectives

• Clone a remote repository read-only.

• Add a remote to push to

Previously when we looked at collaborating together, we cloned a repository and the Owner gave access to the Collaborator. There are many projects we might want to copy and work on, but don’t have write access to the repository.

Cloning a public repository

First, let’s choose a public repository to clone. There are lots of public repositories on github and bitbucket, and this is quite likely the first way you will really get to use revision control. For this example, you can just clone the public version of my “picalc” repository.

git clone https://github.com/chrisrichardson/picalc picalc_chris

Remember, this will clone into a folder called “picalc_chris” and will automatically set the “origin” to point to https://github.com/chrisrichardson/picalc

git remote -v

origin	https://github.com/chris_richardson/picalc.git (fetch)
origin	https://github.com/chris_richardson/picalc.git (push)

Once you have made a copy of the repository, you can edit the files as usual.

Unless we have contacted the author we can’t push changes back to their repository. We could continue editing, and making any changes we want, doing git add and git commit as we go, but we can’t push any changes back to “origin”.

Let’s create another new private repo called “picalc_chris” on GitHub, and push to that instead. We need to give it a local name for the push/pull location, e.g. “myfork”.

git remote add myfork https://your_name@github.com/your_name/picalc_chris

Replace “your_name” with your username on GitHub.

git remote -v

Now we will see two possible locations, one the “origin” (which you can pull from but not push to), and the other is “myfork” which you have full access to:

myfork	https://your_name@github.com/your_name/picalc_chris (fetch)
myfork	https://your_name@github.com/your_name/picalc_chris (push)
origin	https://github.com/chris_richardson/picalc.git (fetch)
origin	https://github.com/chris_richardson/picalc.git (push)

Let’s push back to “myfork”

git push myfork master

You can continue changing the files, doing git add, git commit and git push myfork master as much as you like. Try pushing to origin master and see what happens. Take a look at the commits on the GitHub website.

Key Points

• We can git clone any remote repository we have access to, and make our own online copy.