forks_ahead

A lot of people fork my GitHub repositories, but not many people make any changes. This tool takes the owner and name of a repository, and finds all branches of forks that are ahead of the original repository.

In a terminal, run

gem install forks_ahead

In a terminal, run

forks_ahead <owner> <repo>

Where <owner> is the owner of the base repository and <repo> is the name of the base repository.

GitHub's anonymous rate limits probably won't be enough for this tool to work correctly on a repository of any popularity, so you will probably need to authenticate with GitHub.

Create an OAuth token with repo permissions (private_repo is required to access private repositories), and set it as the FORKS_AHEAD_GITHUB_TOKEN. This is the preferred way of authenticating.

Set your GitHub login as the FORKS_AHEAD_GITHUB_LOGIN environment variable and your GitHub password as FORKS_AHEAD_GITHUB_PASSWORD.

This will not work if you have two-factor authentication enabled on your GitHub account.

$ forks_ahead rubycocoa rubycocoa
Watson1978/rubycocoa:rbenv ahead of rubycocoa:master by 1
alloy/rubycocoa:cocoapods-app ahead of rubycocoa:master by 8
alloy/rubycocoa:cocoapods-app-with-swift ahead of rubycocoa:master by 8

After checking out the repo, run bundle to install dependencies.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in forks_ahead.gemspec, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/alyssais/forks_ahead. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.