🔄 fork-manager

One-tap sync for all your GitHub forks. Built by ModelNorth.

Keep every fork in your GitHub account up to date with its upstream — automatically on a schedule, or manually with a single button click.

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How It Works

1. GitHub Actions fetches a list of all your forked repos
2. For each fork, it calls the GitHub merge-upstream API
3. Forks that are already up to date are skipped cleanly
4. Forks with conflicts (where you have custom commits) are flagged — not force-overwritten by default
5. A full summary is printed at the end

Everything runs server-side on GitHub — no local cloning, no git commands on your machine.

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Setup

1. Fork or clone this repo

2. Create a Personal Access Token (PAT)

Go to GitHub → Settings → Developer Settings → Personal Access Tokens → Fine-grained tokens

• Name: fork-manager-token
• Repository access: All repositories
• Permissions:
  • Contents → Read and Write
  • Actions → Read and Write
  • Metadata → Read only

3. Add the token as a secret

Go to this repo → Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret

• Name: PAT_TOKEN
• Value: your token from step 2

4. You're done

The workflow runs every Monday at 09:00 UTC automatically.

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Manual Trigger

Go to Actions → 🔄 Sync All Forks → Run workflow

You'll get three options:

Option	Description
dry_run	Lists all forks and what would happen — no actual syncing
force_sync	Force-overwrites forks that have diverged from upstream
exclude_repos	Comma-separated list of repo names to skip this run

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Excluding Repos Permanently

Some forks you've heavily modified (e.g. a white-labeled product) should never be auto-synced.

Edit the PERMANENT_EXCLUDES line in .github/workflows/sync-forks.yml:

PERMANENT_EXCLUDES: "repo-name-1,repo-name-2"

These will be skipped on every run, both scheduled and manual.

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Output Example

╔════════════════════════════════════════╗
║        fork-manager by ModelNorth       ║
╚════════════════════════════════════════╝

📡 Fetching all forks...
✅ Found 47 fork(s)

🔄 [SYNCED]     yourname/langchain — Successfully merged 3 commits
✅ [UP TO DATE] yourname/repo-name-1
✅ [UP TO DATE] yourname/repo-name-2
⏭  [EXCLUDED]   yourname/repo-name
⚠️  [CONFLICT]   yourname/repo-name-1 — has diverged from upstream

╔════════════════════════════════════════╗
║              SYNC SUMMARY               ║
╚════════════════════════════════════════╝
🔄 Synced (new commits pulled):  12
✅ Already up to date:           32
⏭  Excluded / skipped:            1
⚠️  Conflicts (needs manual fix):  2
❌ Errors:                         0
─────────────────────────────────────────
📦 Total forks processed:        47

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License

MIT — use freely, contributions welcome.