Add a Local Git Repository to GitHub

Clendon DuRapau — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 03:31:56 +0000

You’ve created a project on your local machine, you’ve initialized it as a git repository, and you’re coding along happily.

Now you’ve decided that you’d like to save a copy on GitHub. Maybe so that you can collaborate with others more easily? Maybe just so that you can save it remotely? Whatever the reason, how do you do it?

It’s easy!

Create a blank GitHub repository like you normally would by clicking one of the “New” buttons you can find in various places on the website after you’ve signed in.
Give your repository a name that makes sense for your project, write a description if you want, and to avoid merge conflicts, leave “Add a README file” and “Add .gitignore” unchecked for now. It’s probably better to just create those on your own at this point if they don’t already exist for your project. Then click on “Create repository” at the bottom of the form.
The best part! GitHub already has instructions here for you on exactly what to do next on your terminal command line! In fact, although we didn’t cover it here, there are even instructions on what to do if you don’t even have a repository at all and how to create one right now if you had not already done so.

So let’s go ahead and use the URL that is provided by GitHub (as you can see in the screenshot) for your new online repository and run those three lines in the terminal from the root directory of your local repository. They’ve made it so easy that you don’t even have to plug in the URL; you can simply copy and paste it. So in my case, it would look like this with the URL for the repo I’ve just made:
```
git remote add origin https://github.com/clendon/practice-repo.git
git branch -M master
git push -u origin master
```

If during step 3, you get the error fatal: remote origin already exists., it’s because your local repository is already associated with a different online repository, but we can remove that association and fix it easily. Do the following:

git remote remove origin

And then attempt step 3 again and that should do the trick.

And there you go, should now be able to push and pull from/to your remote repository on GitHub.

Stop Tracking Files in .gitignore

Clendon DuRapau — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 07:24:15 +0000

Git workflow can get out of sync between team members, causing some very frustrating merge conflicts. In the excitement of getting a new project rolling and setting up the repository, it’s easy to start making commits without realizing that you’ve forgotten to add that pesky package-lock.json to .gitignore or even the target path where all your transpiled files end up.

This can cause things to get ugly fast when working with a team.

Here’s the fastest and easiest solution I have found.

edit your .gitignore file and add the files you do not want tracked.

run the following in the root directory of your project

git ls-files -c --ignored --exclude-standard -z | xargs -0 git rm --cached

Make a new commit

git commit -m "Stopped tracking and deleted files in .gitignore"

Caution:

The ignored files will not automatically be deleted from your local repository after taking these steps. You will have to do that manually if you want to get rid of them.
If you push your changes to a remote repository, when other team members pull the changes to their local repositories, git will delete the ignored files from their machines. This means that those team members will have to rebuild those transpiled files with the compiler used in the project or the package-lock.json with either
```
npm install
```
or
```
npm ci
```

DEV Community: Clendon DuRapau

Add a Local Git Repository to GitHub

Stop Tracking Files in .gitignore