gh-network: find the fork that kept going
These days I run into more “abandoned, but carried on in a fork” repos than ever, and GitHub makes the fork that kept going hard to find. The Forks page is a list that doesn’t tell you much about which forks have real work in them. The Network page is a mess of indecipherable lines you have to pan around, and it hasn’t changed since GitHub launched over a decade ago. So I made gh network, an extension for the GitHub CLI that finds the most active fork of a project.
gh extension install jamiew/gh-network
gh network hammem/monarchmoney
Here’s what the monarchmoney Python library’s network really looks like. 153 forks, about a third of them with commits of their own, and one clear winner: bradleyseanf/monarchmoneycommunity, with 157 stars, 35 forks of its own and a release three weeks ago. You’d never find it from the original repo.
Each fork’s life, from creation to its last commit of its own: the original stops in late 2025, and bradleyseanf, keithah and bbrents keep going.
How much work each fork has of its own versus how recently it had any, so the forks worth a look sit alone in the top right.
For fun, the fork tree with distance from the center as time: everything outside the dashed circle had commits after the original’s last one.
How it works:
- Walks every fork, including forks of forks
- Compares each fork with the repo it came from, on every recent branch, so side-branch work counts too
- Ranks forks by stars, forks, recent commits, releases and open issues
- Reads the original’s README and description for “use X instead” links, and checks same-named repos for the original’s first commit. That catches successors GitHub doesn’t count as forks, like Diegovsky/riff for spot
I started this wondering if there was a better-maintained Requestrr fork. (There isn’t — thomst08’s is still the one.) Then I tested it on 14 repos where we already know which fork took over, against GitHub’s own forks page and Fork Finder, the best existing tool I found:
| GitHub’s forks page | Fork Finder | gh network | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Put the right fork first (9 repos) | 3 | 6 | 9 |
| Found a successor that isn’t a fork (5 repos) | 0 | 0 | 4 |
The one it misses is Atom → Pulsar. Pulsar re-uploaded the code under a new name, and Atom’s README never mentions it. Some things you still have to hear about from a friend.
The test repos are in eval/cases.json if you want to throw your own tool at them. Other tools worth a look: useful-forks, active-forks, Lovely Forks and Krzysztof Kowalczyk’s script.
Shoutout to everyone keeping other people’s projects alive in forks <3
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