How to detach a fork from your GitHub repo

So you've forked a repo on GitHub! Maybe you want to contribute a fix, or bump a package to support the newest version of Laravel.

But weeks, then months, go by with it not being merged. You've started updating your projects to use your package fork directly.

Now you're adding new features and realizing this repo is never going to merge back in with upstream. But GitHub is still showing you options in the user interface relevant to forks. How do you get rid of that and cut ties with upstream?

There's nothing I can find directly in the project UI to do this. And I'm not aware of any git commands you can run locally that would break the connection either.

Instead, you need to use a GitHub support workflow to do it. The virtual assistant bot will ask you a few questions, and then a support ticket will be opened to process the request. And there are other flows like attaching or redirecting a fork as well.

It would be great if it was self-service, but at least it's possible, and hopefully this isn't something you need to do frequently.

Here to help,

Joel

P.S. It always makes me smile when someone downloads one of our free ebooks and decides to put in more than $0 in the checkout field.