FigureYa Help

What is Fork? An Easy Guide for Complete Beginners

What does Fork mean?

On GitHub, Fork means making a complete copy of someone else’s project into your own account.
It’s like copying a folder from someone’s computer to your own space. You can freely experiment and make changes in your copy without affecting the original project.

Why use Fork?

  • Practice and experiment: In your forked copy, you can try changes and learn without worrying about breaking anything.
  • Contribute to projects: If you want to suggest improvements or fix problems, you can make changes in your fork and then send a “Pull Request” to the original project owner.
  • Keep a personal copy: Sometimes you just want to save a project for reference or future use.
  • Run GitHub Actions in your account:
    After forking >FigureYa-Actions, you can use features like GitHub Actions to automatically run workflows (such as testing or building) directly in your own account—even if you don’t have permission in the original project.

How do you Fork a project?

  1. Go to the GitHub project page you’re interested in.
  2. Find the Fork button in the upper-right corner and click it.
  3. Wait a moment—GitHub will copy the project into your account automatically.
  4. Now you’ll see the project in your own account, and you can work with it just like it’s your own.

What can you do after Forking?

  • Edit and change files: Add, delete, or modify anything you like.
  • Send contributions: If you want the original project to use your changes, you can create a Pull Request (PR).
  • No risk to the original: Everything you do in your fork is just for you. The original project owner won’t see your changes unless you submit a PR.
  • Use GitHub Actions:
    You can run automated workflows (Actions) in your fork, such as tests or builds, to experiment or verify your changes.

Common uses for Fork

  • Learning and practicing: See an interesting project? Fork it and play around with the files.
  • Open source contribution: Fix a bug or add a new idea in your fork, then send a PR to the original author.
  • Personal collection: Fork projects you like so you can find them easily later.
  • Running Actions for your own copy:
    >FigureYa-Actions supports GitHub Actions, you can trigger them in your fork for your own experiments.

In one sentence

Fork means “copying someone else’s project to your own account,” so you can practice, experiment, contribute, and even run Actions—no programming experience required!

Have more questions? Open an Issue or contact the project owner for help!