What is origin in Git

Question

When I run   git push origin branchname   What exactly is origin and why do I have to type it before the branch name

User · Answer

From https   www git-tower com learn git glossary origin   In Git   quot origin quot  is a shorthand name for the remote repository that a project was originally cloned from  More precisely  it is used instead of that original repository s URL - and thereby makes referencing much easier  Note that origin is by no means a  quot magical quot  name  but just a standard convention  Although it makes sense to leave this convention untouched  you could perfectly rename it without losing any functionality  In the following example  the URL parameter to the  quot clone quot  command becomes the  quot origin quot  for the cloned local repository  git clone https   github com gittower git-crash-course git

User · Answer

When you clone a repository with git clone  it automatically creates a remote connection called origin pointing back to the cloned repository  This is useful for developers creating a local copy of a central repository since it provides an easy way to pull upstream changes or publish local commits  This behavior is also why most Git-based projects call their central repository origin

User · Answer

The top answer is great  I would just add  that it becomes easy to understand if you think about remotes as locations other than your computer that you may want to move your code to  Some very good examples are   GitHub A server to host your app  So you can certainly have multiple remotes  A very common pattern is to use GitHub to store your code  and a server to host your application  if it s a web application   Then you would have 2 remotes  possibly more if you have other environments   Try opening your git config by typing git config -e Note  press escape  then    then q then enter to quit out Example Here s what you might see in your git configs if you had 3 remotes  In this example  1 remote  called  origin   is GitHub  another remote  called  staging   is a staging server  and the third  called  heroku   is a production server   core          repositoryformatversion   0         filemode   true         bare   false         logallrefupdates   true         ignorecase   true         precomposeunicode   true  remote  quot origin quot           url   https   github com username reponame git         fetch    refs heads   refs remotes origin    branch  quot master quot           remote   origin         merge   refs heads master  remote  quot heroku quot           url   https   git heroku com appname git         fetch    refs heads   refs remotes heroku    remote  quot staging quot           url   https   git heroku com warm-bedlands-98000 git         fetch    refs heads   refs remotes staging    The three lines starting with  remote     show us the remotes we can push to  Running git push origin will push to the url for   remote  quot origin quot     i e  to GitHub But similarly  we could push to another remote  say    remote  quot staging quot     with git push staging  then it would push to https   git heroku com warm-bedlands-98000 git  In the example above  we can see the 3 remotes with git remote  git remote    heroku origin staging  Summary or origin Remotes are simply places on the internet that you may have a reason to send your code to  GitHub is an obvious place  as are servers that host your app  and you may have other locations too  git push origin simply means it will push to  origin   which is the name GitHub chooses to default to  As for branchname branchname is simply what you re pushing to the remote  According the git push help docs  the branchname argument is technically a refspec  which  for practical purposes  is the branch you want to push   Read more in the docs for git push by running  git push --help

User · Answer

origin is not the remote repository name  It is rather a local alias set as a key in place of the remote repository URL   It avoids the user having to type the whole remote URL when prompting a push   This name is set by default and for convention by Git when cloning from a remote for the first time   This alias name is not hard coded and could be changed using following command prompt   git remote rename origin mynewalias   Take a look at http   git-scm com docs git-remote for further clarifications

User · Answer

origin is an alias on your system for a particular remote repository  It s not actually a property of that repository   By doing  git push origin branchname   you re saying to push to the origin repository  There s no requirement to name the remote repository origin  in fact the same repository could have a different alias for another developer   Remotes are simply an alias that store the URL of repositories  You can see what URL belongs to each remote by using  git remote -v   In the push command  you can use remotes or you can simply use a URL directly  An example that uses the URL   git push git github com git git git master

User · Answer

I was also confused by this  and below is what I have learned   When you clone a repository  for example from GitHub    origin is the alias for the URL from which you cloned the repository  Note that you can change this alias  There is one master branch in the remote repository  aliased by origin   There is also another master branch created locally    Further information can be found from this SO question  Git branching  master vs  origin master vs  remotes origin master

User · Answer

remote repository url alias    origin upstream alias    master branch alias     remote  level same as working directory  index  repository  origin  local repository branch map to remote repository branch

User · Answer

The other answers say that origin is an alias for the URL of a remote repository which is not entirely accurate  It should be noted that an address that starts with http is a URL while one that starts with git  is a URI or Universal Resource Identifier   All URLs are URIs  but not all URIs are URLs   In short  when you type git remote add origin  lt URI gt  you are telling your local git that whenever you use the word origin you actually mean the URI that you specified  Think of it like a variable holding a value   And just like a variable  you can name it whatever you want  eg  github  heroku  destination  etc

User · Answer

The best answer here   https   www git-tower com learn git glossary origin     In Git   origin  is a shorthand name for the remote repository that a   project was originally cloned from  More precisely  it is used instead   of that original repository s URL - and thereby makes referencing much   easier

User · Answer

Simple   origin  is just what you nicknamed your remote repository when you ran a command like this   git remote add origin git github com USERNAME REPOSITORY-NAME git   From then on Git knows that  origin  points to that specific repository  in this case a GitHub repository   You could have named it  github  or  repo  or whatever you wanted

User · Answer

Origin is the shortname that acts like an alias for the url of the remote repository  Let me explain with an example  Suppose you have a remote repository called amazing-project and then you clone that remote repository to your local machine so that you have a local repository  Then you would have something like what you can see in the diagram below   Because you cloned the repository  The remote repository and the local repository are linked  If you run the command git remote -v it will list all the remote repositories that are linked to your local repository  There you will see that in order to push or fetch code from your remote repository you will use the shortname  origin    Now  this may be a bit confusing because in GitHub  or the remote server  the project is called  amazing-project   So why does it seem like there are two names for the remote repository   Well one of the names that we have for our repository is the name it has on GitHub or a remote server somewhere  This can be kind of thought like a project name  And in our case that is  amazing-project   The other name that we have for our repository is the shortname that it has in our local repository that is related to the URL of the repository  It is the shortname we are going to use whenever we want to push or fetch code from that remote repository  And this shortname kind of acts like an alias for the url  it s a way for us to avoid having to use that entire long url in order to push or fetch code  And in our example above it is called origin  So  what is origin  Basically origin is the default shortname that Git uses for a remote repository when you clone that remote repository  So it s just the default  In many cases you will have links to multiple remote repositories in your local repository and each of those will have a different shortname  So final question  why don t we just use the same name  I will answer that question with another example  Suppose we have a friend who forks our remote repository so they can help us on our project  And let s assume we want to be able to fetch code from their remote repository  We can use the command git remote add  lt shortname gt   lt url gt  in order to add a link to their remote repository in our local repository   In the above image you can see that I used the shortname friend to refer to my friend s remote repository  You can also see that both of the remote repositories have the same project name amazing-project and that gives us one reason why the remote repository names in the remote server and the shortnames in our local repositories should not be the same  There is a really helpful video  that explains all of this that can be found here

User · Answer

origin is the default alias to the URL of your remote repository

User · Answer

Git has the concept of  remotes   which are simply URLs to other copies of your repository  When you clone another repository  Git automatically creates a remote named  origin  and points to it   You can see more information about the remote by typing git remote show origin

[git] What is "origin" in Git?

Examples related to git