Dealing with remotes in Git.

View

The name origin is the remote and the name origin is the default or convention.

After you clone, you can see your remote.

$ git remote
origin

And you can see what it points to. You might use GitHub or BitBucket here.

$ git remote -v
origin  git@github.com:MichaelCurrin/foo.git (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:MichaelCurrin/foor.git (push)

I guess you could make the fetch and push different but never had to do that.

Add remote to a new repo

When you set up a repo like this, you won’t have any remotes.

$ git init

This should give nothing.

$ git remote -v

Add a remote.

$ git remote add origin git@github.com:MichaelCurrin/dev-cheatsheets.git

You can commit and push now.

You need to include the remote name and branch the first time you pull. Note you’ll get an error doing a pull on an empty remote.

$ git pull origin master

Then just:

$ git pull

Note that if you use VS Code to push, it will create the repo for you on GitHub without having to go through the GitHub UI.

Add remote for a fork

Given you have forked a repo and cloned it and it has this remote setup:

  • origin git@github.com:MyUsername/dev-cheatsheets.git

And the the original repo is at MichaelCurrin/dev-cheatsheets.

So to pull in changes from the original repo into your fork, you can do this. The name upstream is a common name to use.

$ git remote add upstream git@github.com:MichaelCurrin/dev-cheatsheets.git

$ git checkout master

$ git pull upstream master
$ # Or
$ git reset --hard upstream master

Push your local commits to your fork.

$ git push

That implies:

$ git push origin master

Sync a fork

If you are working on a fork, it is useful to have two remotes.

  • One for “origin” for your fork.
  • And one named “upstream” to reference to the original repo.

Add the upstream remote:

$ git remote add upstream git@github.com:abc/def.git

View remotes

$ git remote
upstream
origin

See the URLS with verbose

$ git remote -v
# original repo
upstream    git@github.com:abc/def.git (fetch)
upstream    git@github.com:abc/def.git (push)
# my fork
origin  git@github.com:MichaelCurrin/def.git (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:MichaelCurrin/def.git (push)

Your push and pull operations will use origin by default. The implied values are commented out.

$ git checkout master
$ git pull # origin master

$ git checkout my-feat
$ git pull # origin my-feat

$ git push # origin my-feat

And now you can pull the original repo into your fork!

$ git checkout master
$ git pull # origin master
$ git pull upstream master
$ git push # origin master