A Mutable Log

A blog by Devendra Tewari


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Working with multiple git remotes

This post discusses useful git commands when working with multiple git remotes such as to share code with distributed teams.

We are all familiar with the clone command

git clone repository_url

This creates a local working copy of the remote, identified by the short name origin. You can see all the remote repositories in your working copy thus

git remote -v

The following command fetches commits from origin

git pull

The following command pushes local commits to origin

git push

What if you want to share your copy of the repository so that another team can work on it? Maybe to a new remote repository shared with that team?

This can be done as follows

git remote add repo_short_name repository_url
git push repo_short_name main

You can pull changes from the new repository

git pull repo_short_name main

And push them to origin (origin is assumed if not specified)

git push origin

If a remote has conflicting commits that you want to favor

git pull -s recursive -X theirs repo_short_name main

Pull and rebase on top of remote

git pull --rebase repo_short_name main

For more information on working with remote repositories see chapter 2 of the free Git book.

Once you have mastered the command line, you can do all of the same things using a Git client such as the free SourceTree app from the folks at Atlassian.