Git Remotes for Beginners: An Introductory Guide

#git

If you have read my post on the history of Git, you would know that in order to have effective collaboration, we need to have a version database that is accessible to everyone on the team.

You must also be aware of Github which is a very popular service that helps developers maintain their Git repositories online and enable easy collaboration by acting as the central version database.

In this post, I am interested in introducing you to the concept of Git remotes. The repository that you have uploaded to Github is an example of a Git remote. It is basically a copy of your local Git repository that is accessible to anyone you choose to share your repository with.

There can be more than one remote

Your repository can have multiple remotes, i.e., multiple remote copies of the repository with different read/write permissions for different users. A common case for multiple remotes is in the world of open source projects.

Generally, contributors clone the primary project repository and maintain their own remote copy of the repository (ever heard of forking?), where they push any changes they make. After they are sure of the changes they have made, they request the project maintainers to pull those changes into the primary repository.

A Git remote is represented by the URL of the repository. You must have seen URLs which are of the form git://github.com/<username>/<repo-name>. Since remembering URLs is difficult, Git also allows you to assign shortnames that map to these URLs. By default, when you clone a Git repository, Git assigns the shortname origin to the URL from where you have cloned.

How to list all remotes?

The command git remote lists all the remotes associated with your repository. Without any options, it just lists the shortnames. If you want to view the associated URLs too, then you need to use the --verbose (-v) option. Below is the sample output of the git remote -v command.

origin  git@github.com:ayushpoddar/colorls.git (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:ayushpoddar/colorls.git (push)
upstream    https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls.git (fetch)
upstream    https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls.git (push)

How to add a remote repository?

Apart from the default origin remote, you can add a remote to your repository explicitly. The command for doing so is:

git remote add <shortname> <url>

The shortname can be anything that you choose. As an example, you can add a remote named upstream with the following command:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls.git

In order to fetch all the information from this new remote, you could run git fetch <shortname>. For example, running git fetch upstream in context of the above examples will output:

remote: Enumerating objects: 4, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (4/4), done.
remote: Total 4 (delta 3), reused 4 (delta 3), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (4/4), 555 bytes | 61.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls
 * [new branch]      disable-mfa -> upstream/disable-mfa
   d1e28ed..28c188b  main        -> upstream/main