When you want to change/contribute to other people’s projects that you don’t have access to you usually fork the project, and then use your read+write fork.

What if you first cloned their repo and made local commits that you now want to contribute? You don’t want to mess with patches, so here’s what I did to contribute a small fix to the example project from Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation, a great book by Brett Porter and Maria Odea Ching.

1. Fork the project repo at Github (at https://github.com/brettporter/centrepoint/)
   • The original read only url was https://github.com/brettporter/centrepoint.git
   • My fork url is now git@github.com:carlossg/centrepoint.git
2. In my local clone, I renamed the remote origin to upstream
3. Add a new remote called origin pointing to the read+write fork
4. Change the master branch remote to origin instead of upstream
5. Fetch the remote and push your changes

git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin git@github.com:carlossg/centrepoint.git
git fetch origin
git branch --set-upstream master origin/master
git push origin