Git: track a remote branch

Here is the point:

• you have a git repository
• a random guy forked your repo and made a pull request
• You want to rework his contribution locally before merging it

On your local repo, add the random guy forked repository address and name it random-guy:

git remote add random-guy [email protected]:random-guy/your-project.git

You can see the remote repo you added with this command:

git remote show

Add the remote branch where the random guy did the pull request and name this branch pr-rework (for Pull Request rework). As this branch is on random-guy remote on patch-1 branch, we will “track” random-guy/patch-1 branch.

git checkout -b pr-rework --track random-guy/patch-1

You can now work on this branch, add new commits, and when you will merge it on your main branch, random guy pull request will be automatically closed.