Fork your own Gist

about.md

Fork your own Gist

This is a bookmarklet that adds a fully functional Fork button to your own Gist.

If a Fork button is already present in the page, this bookmarklet will set focus to it instead of adding another one.

The change is temporary and the button will disappear as soon as you navigate away from that Gist (clicking the Fork button does this for you as well).

---

A Closure Compiler optimized version provided below for convenient copy'n'paste.

bookmarklet.js

javascript: (function () {
	var fork, present, star, button, form, forks, count;
	$('.pagehead-actions li').each(function () {
		var action = $(this).find('form').attr('action');
		if (action) {
			switch (action.split('/').pop()) {
			case 'fork':
				fork = $(this);
				present = true;
				break;
			case 'star':
				star = this;
				break;
			}
		}
	});
	if (!fork) {
		fork = $(star).clone();
	}
	button = fork.find('.minibutton');
	if (present) {
		button.focus();
		return;
	}
	form = fork.find('form');
	form.attr('action', form.attr('action').split('/').map(function (a) {
		return a === 'star' ? 'fork' : a;
	}).join('/'));
	button.html('<span class="octicon octicon-git-branch"></span>Fork');
	forks = $('.counter').filter(function () {
		var href = $(this).parent().attr('href');
		return href ? href.split('/').some(function (a) {
			return a === 'forks';
		}) : false;
	});
	count = fork.find('.social-count');
	count.html(forks.text() || 0);
	count.attr('href', forks.parent().attr('href'));
	$('.pagehead-actions li:last').parent().append(fork);
}());

closure-compiled.js

javascript:(function(){var b,e,f,c,d;$(".pagehead-actions li").each(function(){var a=$(this).find("form").attr("action");if(a)switch(a.split("/").pop()){case "fork":b=$(this);e=!0;break;case "star":f=this}});b||(b=$(f).clone());c=b.find(".minibutton");e?c.focus():(d=b.find("form"),d.attr("action",d.attr("action").split("/").map(function(a){return"star"===a?"fork":a}).join("/")),c.html('<span class="octicon octicon-git-branch"></span>Fork'),c=$(".counter").filter(function(){var a=$(this).parent().attr("href");return a?a.split("/").some(function(a){return"forks"===a}):!1}),d=b.find(".social-count"),d.html(c.text()||0),d.attr("href",c.parent().attr("href")),$(".pagehead-actions li:last").parent().append(b))})()

This is quite interesting, because I have never once thought of forking my own Gist or Git repository on GitHub.

I wonder have you contacted GitHub support to discuss the Fork button on Gist since it seems that you can fork your own Git repositories on GtiHub? (There is a Fork button, didn't try it)

VERY helpful -- it's exactly what I needed.

For newbies like me: copy the closure-compiled.js into your new bookmark dialog window as the "location." You can name it anything clever, such as "ForkGist."

Dear Github,

Why don't you let us fork our own gists!

Best wishes,
gre

This is so great thanks very much for it.
I forked it and added some improvements.

1) did not work when if you the page you are trying to run it on was already starred by you
2) if there were 0 stars but were fork count > 0, the fork count would not be a clickable link (note: if there are 0 forks, the link created will still not be clickable)

See here: https://gist.github.com/Noitidart/8794639

Added details for how users can use it from Scratchpad as bookmarklets don't work and also made a Firefox addon out of it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghforkable/

You can get a little further by pasting the raw script of http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js into the developer tools. This gets past the $ is not defined issue. That allows a second "Star" button to appear which is misnamed but when you click it, might attempt to do the right thing. It tries to post to ./fork with, as previously noted, a critical-looking authenticity_token form field and gets back 422 Unprocessable Entity.

To get a “Fork” button with the right fork-count, change .minibutton to .btn-sm, and .counter to .Counter. However, this does not solve the problem with the authenticity_token.

This no longer works because the fork link has been replaced with a form that includes a authenticity_token field. I don't think there is any way around that from the browser.
I now use https://github.com/defunkt/gist from the CLI to:

• # Define your original gist url (I have to use the ssh url to get it to work for my credential-helper)
  original_url="[email protected]:7085254.git"
• # Create a new gist
  url="$(date | gist -f temp)"
• # Clone it
  git clone $url; cd $(basename $url)
• # Add the original gist as a remote and fetch it
  git remote add alt $original_url; git fetch alt
• # Check out the original
  git reset --hard alt/master
• # Push to the new gist
  git push -f origin master

Note: the # are in there so you can copy-pasta the whole block into the terminal 😉