Automatically Adding Remotes For GitHub Forks

I do almost all of my open source work via GitHub. And why not? It's pretty much the standard these days. I love how you can just put something up on GitHub for the whole world to see, and you can follow (and even fix!) your favorite open source projects. Sometimes, if you maintain your own fork of a project, it can lag behind the project leader's, though. Which means after your fork stagnates, you have to clone a copy, and do something like this:

git remote add base github:$user/$repo
git fetch base
git rebase base/master

(If that github: prefix looks unfamiliar to you, look here)

This isn't that big of a deal, but sometimes you forget who you forked from, or you misspell the name, or whatever. It's because of this that I created my own post-checkout Git hook that automatically adds a base remote for a fork's parent if you're cloning a fork of a GitHub project!

https://github.com/hoelzro/dotfiles/blob/master/git-hooks/post-checkout/10-github-fork-remote-setup

All you need to do is put this in your Git init.templatedir hooks directory, make it executable, and install Net::GitHub and LWP::Protocol::https from CPAN. Then all of your new clones will automatically have the extra remote set up after git clone is finished cloning your repo!