Learn about Git Remote

This is the third post on git which will be covering how to work with git remotes.

There are some prerequisites for this post, which are my last two posts on git core concepts and git branching and merging. Please check them if you want.

Topics that we’ll be covering in this article.

• Git remotes
• Intro on Github
• How to create a repository
• git push command
• git pull command
• How to handle multiple remotes on the single repository?

What is git remote?

What is git remote? A remote is a repository in another location, which will be used as a backup on someone else’s computer. To create a git remote, you can use one of the popular services like GitHub, Gitlab, and bitbucket. For this post, I will be using the GitHub service for creating out remote repository.

Github

Github is a global company that provides hosting for software version control using Git. Github brings together the world’s largest community of developers to discover, share and build better software.

Create a repository in GitHub

• Go to the https://github.com/ and login into your account.
• If you don’t have GitHub account, go ahead and create one.
• Once you are logged in, https://github.com/new you can click this link which is going to take you the create repository page or you will find add repository button on the GitHub home page.
• Please fill in necessary details in the create repository form and hit create repository button to create it.
• If you have selected the Initialize this repository with a README checkbox it must have created a README.md file for you.

Clone repository

I am assuming that you have git installed your system if you don’t have please checkout prerequisites.

To clone a repository from the GitHub on to your local system. For that first, you need to copy your git repository address. To copy it you need to open your GitHub repository and click on the clone or download button and from Clone with HTTPS copy your GitHub repository address.

We will be using the git clone command for cloning our repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git
Cloning into 'git-remote-example'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.

Replace your own GitHub repository address with the above command.

git remote command

Now you have your GitHub repository cloned on your local. You can go inside it by changing the directory.

$ cd git-remote-example

Here execute the command git remote, it displays a list of remotes in your current repository.

$ git remote
origin

After the clone, we have default remote origin which is pointing to the Github repository https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git.

To view the full location of the remote you can add -v option with git remote command.

$ git remote -v
origin    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git (fetch)
origin    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git (push)

git push command

git push command is used to push the local repository content to the remote repository. Pushing is how your local git repository commits get transfer to the remote repository.

To see how does the git push works, first, we need to do some changes to how local repository.

Create example.txt file under git-remote-example directory and put whatever text you want to put inside.

Below command will create an example.txt with Hello World inside it.

$ echo Hello World >> example.txt

Now if you execute git status, you will see a new file as the untracked files.

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

    example.txt

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
``

Add it by with `git add` command to the staging area.

```zsh
$ git add example.txt

If you do git log it shows us commit history. If there is README.md file there in your repo, you can see you already have one commit there, which has been created by git to add the README.md file to your repository.

$ git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph
* a5b133a (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Initial commit

In the above output HEAD is pointing to master, origin/master and origin/HEAD, here the origin/master and origin/HEAD refering to the remote master branch and HEAD.

Let’s commit our example.txt file to the commit history.

$ git commit -m "second commit"
[master ed1bbca] second commit
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 example.txt

$ git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph
* ed1bbca (HEAD -> master) second commit
* a5b133a (origin/master, origin/HEAD) Initial commit

In the above output, you can see that our local master is ahead of the remote master branch. To sync the origin/master with our local master we need to push our changes to the remote repository.

To push changes to the remote branch we use git push command along with remote alias and remote branch.

$ git push origin master
Enumerating objects: 4, done.
Counting objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 294 bytes | 294.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git
   a5b133a..ed1bbca  master -> master

Now if execute git log in your terminal, you could see that HEAD is now also pointing to origin/master and origin/HEAD.

$ git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph
* ed1bbca (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) second commit
* a5b133a Initial commit

git pull command

Git pull command is used to update the local version of the repository with the remote version. Merging remote upstream changes to your local repository is a common task in the Git-based collaboration workflow.

The git pull command is a combination of two commands, git fetch followed by git merge.

Right now, we don’t have any changes that exist on the remote repository and don’t exist on the local repository.

But, we’ll gonna execute it anyway.

$ git pull origin master
From https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up to date.

git pull runs along with two params remote name and branch name.

The output is showing that our branch is updated to date with the remote branch.

How to handle multiple remotes on the single repository?

For understanding this concept we have two options: one is to fork a repository and the second one is to create a separate repository. We’ll be moving ahead with forking a repository, which is going to create a separate copy of that repository in our GitHub account. To do it follow these steps:

• I found this https://github.com/rmccue/test-repository repository on GitHub, which we’ll fork. To fork, open https://github.com/rmccue/test-repository link in the browser and make sure you have logged in with your account and click on the fork button the top right of the page.
• Which is going to open a popup where you want to copy it, select your account.
• After that copy the repository location from clone and download and use git clone command to clone it to the local system.

$ git clone https://github.com/mountainfirefly/test-repository.git
Cloning into 'test-repository'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 9, done.
remote: Total 9 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 9
Unpacking objects: 100% (9/9), done.

Go inside the repository and execute git remote -v.

$ cd test-repository
$ git remote -v
origin    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/test-repository.git (fetch)
origin    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/test-repository.git (push)

Now, what we going to do it is to merge both repository content. This is going to be fun and also the first time I am doing this kind of stuff.

Here we are going to add our remote repository location inside this repository.

To add a remote git have git remote add <remote_name> <repo_url> command. Here I will put my own repository address, please put it your’s repository address in place of it.

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git

To view the list of remotes

$ git remote -v
origin    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/test-repository.git (fetch)
origin    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/test-repository.git (push)
upstream    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git (fetch)
upstream    https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git (push)

Now we’ll pull upstream remote changes to the origin remote repository.

$ git pull upstream master --allow-unrelated-histories
From https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 README.md   | 1 +
 example.txt | 1 +
 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 README.md
 create mode 100644 example.txt

The --allow-unrelated-histories option we have used to merge unrelated history if there are any.

Execute ls command

$ ls
README      README.md   example.txt opml.php

Here we have our repository changes in this repository, to push it to the remote repo we’ll be using git push.

Now we’ll update both remote repository with each other changes.

Update our own created repository, which is on origin remote name.

$ git push origin master
Enumerating objects: 9, done.
Counting objects: 100% (9/9), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (8/8), 1.22 KiB | 415.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 8 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/mountainfirefly/test-repository.git
   e53f405..2abf1d1  master -> master

Update the forked repository, which is on the upstream remote name.

$ git push upstream master
Enumerating objects: 12, done.
Counting objects: 100% (12/12), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (8/8), done.
Writing objects: 100% (11/11), 1.50 KiB | 382.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 11 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/mountainfirefly/git-remote-example.git
   ed1bbca..2abf1d1  master -> master

Open both repositories on your browser and you can see both the repositories has each other changes.

That is all for this post, I hope you must have enjoyed it.

I write articles like this every week, you can check those out here mountainfirefly.dev