Update frontend theme using git

Frontend themes and templates are incredibly helpful for starting a project or using as a base, letting you focus on what you need—like I’m doing with this blog! I’m using the Astro Paper theme, which includes amazing features for a blog, so I can focus entirely on the content I want to share.

But as time goes on, new features and bug fixes are added, and keeping your site up-to-date with the latest updates from the original theme repository is essential. In this post, I’ll show you a straightforward method to update your blog or website with changes from the original repository, using Git for a seamless upgrade.

Table of contents

Before start

Create a copy of your master/main branch:

First thing first, you need to have a backup of you main branch.

git checkout master && git checkout -b master-backup

Remove all commits not related with main code

In my case I have added some commits, like edited some files, added some posts and so on, in this case I need to remove them, and keep the last one only. it will avoid a bunch of conflicts.

- 9fefe8a (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) New post: Get Frontend Theme Updates Using Git
- 27cc000 New post: Decorator pattern from open source code
- 0e64c87 New post: A beginner's guide to setting up PHP on your computer
- 1d132e6 [erison.work] new files added
- 739e076 [AstroPaper] remove old posts
- 063090b [AstroPaper][erison.work] local changes
e66898e Initial commit from Astro (v4.0.0)

Note: I have squased all commits form original repository into one e6689e, you going to see this on steps bellow.

Orginize your remote repositories

Check how are your remotes running:

git remote -v

You should have something like this

astro-paper     https://github.com/satnaing/astro-paper.git (fetch)
astro-paper     https://github.com/satnaing/astro-paper.git (push)
origin  [email protected]:shield-wall/erison-work.git (fetch)
origin  [email protected]:shield-wall/erison-work.git (push)

• astro-paper is the main repository (upstream).
• origin is your fork.

Convert All Commits into One

The first thing to start to update your project is get all commits from original repository, in our example we want to get the version v4.5.0

git pull --rebase astro-paper v4.5.0 --allow-unrelated-histories

After running this command, your commit history should look something like this:

d89fb48 (HEAD -> main, tag: v4.5.0) bump: version 4.4.0 → 4.5.0
c164b5e build(deps): upgrade dependencies (#381)
cbbb3eb perf: preload font and load theme script asynchronously (#380)
1a19eb5 build(deps): bump path-to-regexp from 6.2.2 to 6.3.0 (#379)
66c2664 build(deps): bump dset from 3.1.3 to 3.1.4 (#377)

Now, let’s convert all commits into a single one:

git reset --soft $(git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD) \
&& git commit --amend --no-edit

After executing these commands, your commit history will now appear as follows:

7f94f8b (HEAD -> main) Initial commit from Astro

Move back your changes to master branch

Now you need to move back your changes from your master-backup to master

# commits into the master-backup
+ 9fefe8a (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) New post: Get Frontend Theme Updates Using Git
+ 27cc000 New post: Decorator pattern from open source code
+ 0e64c87 New post: A beginner's guide to setting up PHP on your computer
+ 1d132e6 [erison.work] new files added
+ 739e076 [AstroPaper] remove old posts
+ 063090b [AstroPaper][erison.work] local changes
e66898e Initial commit from Astro (v4.0.0)

Cherry-pick one by one and solve the conflicts that appears.

After you finish you going to see something like this:

  9fefe8a (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) New post: Get Frontend Theme Updates Using Git
  27cc000 New post: Decorator pattern from open source code
  0e64c87 New post: A beginner's guide to setting up PHP on your computer
  1d132e6 [erison.work] new files added
  739e076 [AstroPaper] remove old posts
  063090b [AstroPaper][erison.work] local changes
  7f94f8b (HEAD -> main) Initial commit from Astro

Push your changes

Now you need to push your changes to origin

git push origin master --force

Conclusion

The main key for this approach works is: keep your git tree orginized! this way you can Cherry-pick you commits easially betwenn backup branch and master, and use rebase besides merge, it will help you keep a simple git tree.

If this guide helped you, or if you ran into any issues, let me know in the comments below!