What is git remote add and git push origin master

Question

Quite often  Git and Rails looks like magic    such as in the first chapter of Rails 3 Tutorial book  it talks about Git   git remote add origin git github com peter first app git git push origin master   and it pretty much says  it just works  without saying too much about what they are and start talking about branching   Searching on the net shows that git remote add is to add a  short name   such as origin  and it can be any name as well  which is like an alias to a URL   And origin is the usual path of where the remote repo points to    in http   git-scm com book en Git-Basics-Working-with-Remotes under  Adding Remote Repositories    So why is the URL not  git   git github com peter first app git but in the other syntax -- what syntax is it   Why must it end with  git    I tried not using  git at the end and it works too   If not  git  what else can it be   The git in git github com seems to be a user account on the git server   Also  why does it need to be so verbose to use git push origin master   Can t the default be origin and master   I found that the first time  the origin master is needed  but after a small edit and commit  then git push is all it needs  no need origin master    Can somebody who knows what is going on give some details   Sometimes it feels like a lot of magic without explanation    and sometimes the person using it is so confident and when asked why  can t explain it  and respond with something like  that s the way it is    Sometimes very practical and pragmatic   It is not bad to be practical  but probably not practical to the point to not know what is going on

User · Answer

Update  note that the currently accepted answer perpetuates a common misunderstanding about the behaviour of git push  which hasn t been corrected despite a comment pointing it out   Your summary of what remotes are - like a nickname for the URL of a repository - is correct      So why does the URL not git   git github com peter first app git but in the other syntax -- what syntax is it  Why must it end with  git  I tried not using  git at the end and it works too  If not  git  what else can it be  The git at the beginner seems to be a user account on the git server    The two URLs that you ve mentioned indicate that two different transport protocols should be used   The one beginning with git    is for the git protocol  which is usually only used for read-only access to repositories   The other one  git github com peter first app git  is one of the different ways of specifying access to a repository over SSH - this is the  scp-style syntax  described in the documentation   That the username in the scp-style syntax is git is because of the way that GitHub deals with identifying users - essentially that username is ignored  and the user is identified based on the SSH key-pair that they used to authenticate   As for the verbosity of git push origin master  you ve noticed that after the first push  you can then just do git push   This is because of a series of difficult-to-remember-but-generally-helpful defaults      If no remote is specified  the remote configured for the current branch  in remote master url in your case  is used   If that s not set up  then origin is used  If there s no  refspec   e g  master  master my-experiment  etc   specified  then git defaults to pushing every local branch that has the same name as a branch on the remote   If you just have a branch called master in common between your repository and the remote one  that ll be the same as pushing your master to the remote master    Personally  since I tend to have many topic branches  and often several remotes  I always use the form   git push origin master       to avoid accidentally pushing other branches     In reply to your comments on one of the other answers  it sounds to me as if are learning about git in a top-down way very effectively - you ve discovered that the defaults work  and your question is asking about why     To be more serious  git can be used essentially as simply as SVN  but knowing a bit about remotes and branches means you can use it much more flexibily and this can really change the way you work for the better   Your remark about a semester course makes me think of something Scott Chacon said in a podcast interview - students are taught about all kinds of basic tools in computer science and software engineering  but very rarely version control   Distributed version control systems such as git and Mercurial are now so important  and so flexible  that it would be worth teaching courses on them to give people a good grounding   My view is that with git  this learning curve is absolutely worth it - working with lots of topic branches  merging them easily  and pushing and pulling them about between different repositories is fantastically useful once you become confident with the system   It s just unfortunate that    The primary documentation for git is so hard to parse for newcomers    Although I d argue that if you Google for almost any git question  helpful tutorial material  or Stack Overflow answers     come up nowadays   There are a few odd behaviours in git that are hard to change now because many scripts may rely on them  but are confusing to people

User · Answer

The   git at the end of the repository name is just a convention   Typically  on git servers repositories are kept in directories named project git   The git client and protocol honours this convention by testing for project git when only project is specified  git   git github com peter first app git is not a valid git url   git repositories can be identified and accessed via various url schemes specified here   git github com peter first app git  is the ssh url  mentioned on that page  git is flexible   It allows you to track your local branch against almost any branch of any repository   While master  your local default branch  tracking origin master  the remote default branch  is a popular situation   it is not universal   Many a times you may not want to do that   This is why the first git push is so verbose  It tells git what to do with the local master branch when you do a git pull or a git push  The default for git push and git pull is to work with the current branch s remote   This is a better default than origin master    The way git push determines this is explained here    git is fairly elegant and comprehensible but there is a learning curve to walk through

User · Answer

Git remote add origin   It centralises your source code to the other projects It is developed based on Linux  complete open source and make your code useful to the other git users we call it as reference  Pushes your code into git repository using remote url of the git hub

User · Answer

git is like UNIX  User friendly but picky about its friends  It s about as powerful and as user friendly as a shell pipeline  That being said  once you understand its paradigms and concepts  it has the same zenlike clarity that I ve come to expect from UNIX command line tools  You should consider taking some time off to read one of the many good git tutorials available online  The Pro Git book is a good place to start  To answer your first question   What is git remote add     As you probably know  git is a distributed version control system  Most operations are done locally  To communicate with the outside world  git uses what are called remotes  These are repositories other than the one on your local disk which you can push your changes into  so that other people can see them  or pull from  so that you can get others changes   The command git remote add origin git github com peter first app gitcreates a new remote called origin located at git github com peter first app git  Once you do this  in your push commands  you can push to origin instead of typing out the whole URL   What is git push origin master This is a command that says  quot push the commits in the local branch named master to the remote named origin quot   Once this is executed  all the stuff that you last synchronised with origin will be sent to the remote repository and other people will be able to see them there    Now about transports  i e  what git     means  Remote repository URLs can be of many types  file     https    etc    Git simply relies on the authentication mechanism provided by the transport to take care of permissions and stuff  This means that for file    URLs  it will be UNIX file permissions  etc  The git    scheme is asking git to use its own internal transport protocol  which is optimised for sending git changesets around  As for the exact URL  it s the way it is because of the way github has set up its git server  Now the verbosity  The command you ve typed is the general one  It s possible to tell git something like  quot the branch called master over here is local mirror of the branch called foo on the remote called bar quot   In git speak  this means that master tracks bar foo  When you clone for the first time  you will get a branch called master and a remote called origin  where you cloned from  with the local master set to track the master on origin  Once this is set up  you can simply say git push and it ll do it  The longer command is available in case you need it  e g  git push might push to the official public repo and git push review master can be used to push to a separate remote which your team uses to review code   You can set your branch to be a tracking branch using the --set-upstream option of the git branch command  I ve felt that git  unlike most other apps I ve used  is better understood from the inside out  Once you understand how data is stored and maintained inside the repository  the commands and what they do become crystal clear  I do agree with you that there s some elitism amongst many git users but I also found that with UNIX users once upon a time  and it was worth ploughing past them to learn the system  Good luck

User · Answer

This is an answer to this question  Export Heroku App to a new GitHub repo  which has been marked as duplicate of this one and redirected here  I wanted to mirror my repo from Heroku to Github personal so that it shows all commits etc also which I made in Heroku  https   docs github com en free-pro-team latest github importing-your-projects-to-github importing-a-git-repository-using-the-command-line in Github documentation was useful

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Have a look at the syntax for adding a remote repo   git remote add origin  lt url of remote repository gt    Example   git remote add origin git github com peter first app git   Let us dissect the command    git remote this is used to manage your Central servers for hosting your git repositories    May be you are using Github for your central repository stuff  I will give you a example and explain the git remote add origin command   Suppose I am working with GitHub and BitBucket for the central servers for the git repositories and have created repositories on both the websites for my first-app project   Now if I want to push my changes to both these git servers then I will need to tell git how to reach these central repositories  So I will have to add these   For GitHub  git remote add gh origin https   github com user first-app-git git   And For BitBucket  git remote add bb origin https   user bitbucket org user first-app-git git   I have used two variables   as far it is easy for me to call them variables   gh origin   gh FOR GITHUB   and bb origin   bb for BITBUCKET   just to explain you we can call origin anything we want   Now after making some changes I will have to send push  all these changes to central repositories so that other users can see these changes  So I call  Pushing to GitHub  git push gh origin master   Pushing to BitBucket  git push bb origin master   gh origin is holding value of https   github com user first-app-git git and bb origin is holding value of https   user bitbucket org user first-app-git git      This two variables are making my life easier   as whenever I need to send my code changes I need to use this words instead of remembering or typing the URL for the same   Most of the times you wont see anything except than origin as most of the times you will deal with only one central repository like Github or BitBucket for example

[git] What is "git remote add ..." and "git push origin master"?

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