How to Update Your Fork on Github for Windows

I have installed GitHub for Windows and don’t regret it. It saved me remembering every git command, and let me work more easily with repositories.

I am sure,  not many developers will download it, specially Ruby on Rails developers who are used to writing commands and are not fan of development using tools with rich UI.

But for me, I needed something to simplify my git workflow, while working with others on an open source project related to Ruby on Rails facebook group.

One of the main processes developers use on open source projects are forking and updating their forks with the original repository.

Unfortunately this feature is still not available on GitHub for Windows 1.2.3.0 (Nov 13).

I checked with the wonderful support team of GitHub

My question:

Is it true that, in GitHub for Windows, we cannot update our fork with the last commits from the original repository, and we have to do it using the shell manually?

Their answer:

That’s correct. We know how important this is in the ‘fork and submit pull request’ workflow, and as a result this is high on our list of things to implement in GitHub for Windows. Unfortunately I can’t give a firm date for when we’ll release this feature.
 
Thanks for letting us know you’d like to see this added, and be sure to keep an eye on github.com/blog and the GitHub for Windows release notes for updates.

So for now if you need to update your fork with the latest from the original repository, you will have to run the shell as shown below:

then run the commands:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/user/original_repo_you_forked_from

git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master

Then press the sync button, to sync to your fork on github website.