Does Beanstalk support forking for Git repos?
No, not exactly. Forking is a concept created by GitHub and is not a part of Git itself. Forking was introduced to allow collaborators to contribute their ideas or suggested improvements to open source projects by giving them a copy of the codebase in a separate repo. As GitHub puts it:
A fork is a copy of a repository. Forking a repository allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project. Most commonly, forks are used to either propose changes to someone else's project or to use someone else's project as a starting point for your own idea.
However, while this is not included in Git, Beanstalk does support methods that achieve much the same purpose.
Branching
The Wildbit team strongly encourages people to use a branch based development workflow. Branching is fully supported by Git and allows teams to experiment without affecting their stable product or website. When it comes to open source software, forking makes sense. But with private repositories, a focus for Beanstalk, it’s less relevant. You do not share copies of your project code with others.
In that light, branching allows you to achieve the purpose of experimenting and improving on existing ideas. If you're not yet using branches in your workflow, check out our guides on this subject: