Project development with coockiecutter and private repos

[awmar1]

How should I go with my development process ( adding new endpoints...etc) The cookiecutter method removes the .git file and changes the {{cookiecutter.project_name}} to my project name. from my understanding ( an example: https://medium.com/@bilalbayasut/github-how-to-make-a-fork-of-public-repository-private-6ee8cacaf9d3 ) I should just mirror the repo to my private repo and work my way there and when I need to update it I would just pull the changes from here into a branch and then merge it. am I understanding this wrong? How normally this process would go?