GitHub Fork Limit: One Per Account

GitHub Fork Limit: One Per Account | Generated by AI

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Question: Can I fork the same GitHub repo twice into two forks with different names under my account?

Answer:

No — GitHub allows only one fork of a given repo per account/org. The fork relationship is keyed to the upstream repo, not the name. Once you’ve forked owner/repo, hitting “Fork” again just redirects you to your existing fork.

Workarounds to get a second copy with a different name:

1. Rename your existing fork, then fork again (still limited to one true fork) — renaming doesn’t free up a second fork slot. Skip this; it doesn’t work.

2. Bare-clone + push to a new repo (most common, no fork relationship):

# Create the new empty repo first (via gh CLI)
gh repo create lzwjava/repo-copy --private

# Mirror the source
git clone --bare https://github.com/owner/repo.git
cd repo.git
git push --mirror https://github.com/lzwjava/repo-copy.git
cd .. && rm -rf repo.git

This gives you an independent repo (all branches/tags) with whatever name you want, but it won’t show as a fork (no “forked from” link, no PR-to-upstream UI by default). You can still add upstream manually:

git clone https://github.com/lzwjava/repo-copy.git
cd repo-copy
git remote add upstream https://github.com/owner/repo.git
git fetch upstream

3. Use a second account/org — fork the original under your personal account, fork again under an org you own. Each namespace gets one fork.

4. gh repo fork with --fork-name (one fork still):

gh repo fork owner/repo --fork-name my-custom-name --clone

This lets you name the single fork, but you still can’t make a second one this way.

For your workflow (CLI agents, experiments), option 2 is the cleanest — independent repos you can hack on freely without the fork constraint, and you wire up upstream manually when you want to sync.

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