2.5 Git Basics - Working with Remotes

To see which remote servers you have configured, you can run the git remote command. It lists the shortnames of each remote handle you’ve specified. If you’ve cloned your repository, you should at least see origin – that is the default name Git gives to the server you cloned from:

You can also specify -v, which shows you the URLs that Git has stored for the shortname to be used when reading and writing to that remote:

If you have more than one remote, the command lists them all. For example, a repository with multiple remotes for working with several collaborators might look something like this.

This means we can pull contributions from any of these users pretty easily. We may additionally have permission to push to one or more of these, though we can’t tell that here.

Notice that these remotes use a variety of protocols; we’ll cover more about this in Getting Git on a Server.

I’ve mentioned and given some demonstrations of adding remote repositories in previous sections, but here is how to do it explicitly. To add a new remote Git repository as a shortname you can reference easily, run git remote add [shortname] [url]:

Now you can use the string pb on the command line in lieu of the whole URL. For example, if you want to fetch all the information that Paul has but that you don’t yet have in your repository, you can run git fetch pb:

Paul’s master branch is now accessible locally as pb/master – you can merge it into one of your branches, or you can check out a local branch at that point if you want to inspect it. (We’ll go over what branches are and how to use them in much more detail in [ch03-git-branching].)

As you just saw, to get data from your remote projects, you can run:

The command goes out to that remote project and pulls down all the data from that remote project that you don’t have yet. After you do this, you should have references to all the branches from that remote, which you can merge in or inspect at any time.

If you clone a repository, the command automatically adds that remote repository under the name “origin”. So, git fetch origin fetches any new work that has been pushed to that server since you cloned (or last fetched from) it. It’s important to note that the git fetch command pulls the data to your local repository – it doesn’t automatically merge it with any of your work or modify what you’re currently working on. You have to merge it manually into your work when you’re ready.

If you have a branch set up to track a remote branch (see the next section and [ch03-git-branching] for more information), you can use the git pull command to automatically fetch and then merge a remote branch into your current branch. This may be an easier or more comfortable workflow for you; and by default, the git clone command automatically sets up your local master branch to track the remote master branch (or whatever the default branch is called) on the server you cloned from. Running git pull generally fetches data from the server you originally cloned from and automatically tries to merge it into the code you’re currently working on.

When you have your project at a point that you want to share, you have to push it upstream. The command for this is simple: git push [remote-name] [branch-name]. If you want to push your master branch to your origin server (again, cloning generally sets up both of those names for you automatically), then you can run this to push any commits you’ve done back up to the server:

This command works only if you cloned from a server to which you have write access and if nobody has pushed in the meantime. If you and someone else clone at the same time and they push upstream and then you push upstream, your push will rightly be rejected. You’ll have to pull down their work first and incorporate it into yours before you’ll be allowed to push. See [ch03-git-branching] for more detailed information on how to push to remote servers.

If you want to see more information about a particular remote, you can use the git remote show [remote-name] command. If you run this command with a particular shortname, such as origin, you get something like this:

It lists the URL for the remote repository as well as the tracking branch information. The command helpfully tells you that if you’re on the master branch and you run git pull, it will automatically merge in the master branch on the remote after it fetches all the remote references. It also lists all the remote references it has pulled down.

That is a simple example you’re likely to encounter. When you’re using Git more heavily, however, you may see much more information from git remote show:

This command shows which branch is automatically pushed to when you run git push while on certain branches. It also shows you which remote branches on the server you don’t yet have, which remote branches you have that have been removed from the server, and multiple branches that are automatically merged when you run git pull.

If you want to rename a reference you can run git remote rename to change a remote’s shortname. For instance, if you want to rename pb to paul, you can do so with git remote rename:

It’s worth mentioning that this changes your remote branch names, too. What used to be referenced at pb/master is now at paul/master.

If you want to remove a remote for some reason – you’ve moved the server or are no longer using a particular mirror, or perhaps a contributor isn’t contributing anymore – you can use git remote rm: