Why do I need to explicitly push a new branch

Question

I am new in git and I am practicing  I created a local branch but I saw that when I did git push my branch was not uploaded to the repository  I had to actually do  git push -u origin --all  Why is this  Isn t a branch a new change to be pushed by default  Why do I need to run the second command

User · Answer

At first check   Step-1  git remote -v   if found git initialize then remove or skip step-2  Step-2  git remote rm origin   Then configure your email address globally git  Step-3  git config --global user email  youremail example com   Step-4  git initial  Step-5  git commit -m  Initial Project    If already add project repo then skip step-6  Step-6  git remote add origin  repo link from bitbucket org    Step-7  git push -u origin master

User · Answer

The actual reason is that  in a new repo  git init   there is no branch  no master  no branch at all  zero branches   So when you are pushing for the first time to an empty upstream repo  generally a bare one   that upstream repo has no branch of the same name   And    the default push policy was  matching   push all the branches of the same name  creating them if they don t exist    the default push policy is now  simple   push only the current branch  and only if it has a similarly named remote tracking branch on upstream  since git 1 7 11    In both cases  since the upstream empty repo has no branch    there is no matching named branch yet there is no upstream branch at all  with or without the same name  Tracking or not    That means your local first push has no idea    where to push  what to push  since it cannot find any upstream branch being either recorded as a remote tracking branch  and or having the same name    So you need at least to do a   git push origin master   But if you do only that  you    will create an upstream master branch on the upstream  now non-empty repo   good  won t record that the local branch  master  needs to be pushed to upstream  origin   master   upstream branch   bad    That is why it is recommended  for the first push  to do a   git push -u origin master   That will record origin master as a remote tracking branch  and will enable the next push to automatically push master to origin master   git checkout master git push   And that will work too with push policies  current  or  upstream   In each case  after the initial git push -u origin master  a simple git push will be enough to continue pushing master to the right upstream branch

User · Answer

I just experienced a further permutation of this issue   I had a branch named feat XYZ-1234-some-description because I was working on Jira  issue 1234  During the work I created a new Jira issue to track a smaller piece of work  and when I came to push I decided to push to a branch name with this new issue number in   git push -u origin feat XYZ-5678-a-different-description   failed   This gave me the error being discussed in this SO thread  But since I was trying to push to a different branch name from my current branch  my problem was different to the one described here  I ended up renaming my local branch before I could push it   git branch -m feat XYZ-1234-some-description feat XYZ-5678-a-different-description git push -u origin feat XYZ-5678-a-different-description   now works   After a bit more reading around I realised that I could have set a src on the  git push  either to the current branch name  or just HEAD if appropriate   git push -u origin feat XYZ-1234-some-description feat XYZ-5678-a-different-description   also works

User · Answer

I couldn t find a rationale by the original developers this quickly  but I can give you an educated guess based on a few years of Git experience   No  not every branch is something you want to push to the outside world  It might represent a private experiment   Moreover  where should git push send all the branches  Git can work with multiple remotes and you may want to have different sets of branches on each  E g  a central project GitHub repo may have release branches  a GitHub fork may have topic branches for review  and a local Git server may have branches containing local configuration  If git push would push all branches to the remote that the current branch tracks  this kind of scheme would be easy to screw up

User · Answer

If you enable to push new changes from your new branch first time  And getting below error    git push -f fatal  The current branch Coding Preparation has no upstream branch    To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream  use  git push -u origin new branch name      Successful Result      git push -u origin Coding Preparation Enumerating objects  5  done  Counting objects  100   5 5   done  Delta compression using up to 4 threads Compressing objects  100   3 3   done  Writing objects  100   3 3   599 bytes   599 00 KiB s  done  Total 3  delta 0   reused 0  delta 0  remote  remote  Create a pull request for  Coding Preparation  on GitHub by visiting          new branch       Coding Preparation - gt  Coding Preparation Branch  Coding Preparation  set up to track remote branch  Coding Preparation  from  origin

User · Answer

You don t  see below  I find this  feature  rather annoying since I m not trying to launch rockets to the moon  just push my damn branch  You probably do too or else you wouldn t be here   Here is the fix  if you want it to implicitly push for the current branch regardless of if that branch exists on origin just issue this command once and you will never have to again anywhere   git config --global push default current   So if you make branches like this   git checkout -b my-new-branch   and then make some commits and then do a  git push -u   to get them out to origin  being on that branch  and it will create said branch for you if it doesn t exist   Note the -u bit makes sure they are linked if you were to pull later on from said branch  If you have no plans to pull the branch later  or are okay with another one liner if you do  -u is not necessary

User · Answer

Output of git push when pushing a new branch   gt  git checkout -b new branch Switched to a new branch  new branch   gt  git push fatal  The current branch new branch has no upstream branch  To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream  use      git push --set-upstream origin new branch   A simple git push assumes that there already exists a remote branch that the current local branch is tracking  If no such remote branch exists  and you want to create it  you must specify that using the -u  short form of --set-upstream  flag   Why this is so  I guess the implementers felt that creating a branch on the remote is such a major action that it should be hard to do it by mistake  git push is something you do all the time    Isn t a branch a new change to be pushed by default   I would say that  a change  in Git is a commit  A branch is a pointer to a commit  To me it makes more sense to think of a push as something that pushes commits over to the other repositories  Which commits are pushed is determined by what branch you are on and the tracking relationship of that branch to branches on the remote   You can read more about tracking branches in the Remote Branches chapter of the Pro Git book

User · Answer

HEAD is short for current branch so git push -u origin HEAD works  Now to avoid this typing everytime I use alias   git config --global alias pp  push -u origin HEAD   After this  everytime I want to push branch created via git -b branch I can push it using   git pp  Hope this saves time for someone

[git] Why do I need to explicitly push a new branch?

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