Working with Remotes

Everything so far has lived only on your machine. A remote is a copy of the repository hosted somewhere else — usually a service like GitHub — that you and your collaborators sync with.

git clone

To get a local copy of a repository that already exists somewhere else (a teammate's project, an open-source library, your own repo on GitHub), use git clone with its URL:

git clone https://github.com/ava-chen/my-project.git

This downloads the entire history — not just the latest files — and sets up a connection back to that URL automatically, so you don't have to configure anything else to start pulling and pushing.

git remote

That connection is called a remote, and by convention the one you cloned from is named origin. See what remotes a repository knows about:

git remote -v

origin  https://github.com/ava-chen/my-project.git (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/ava-chen/my-project.git (push)

If you started with git init locally instead of cloning, you can connect it to a freshly created (empty) GitHub repository yourself:

git remote add origin https://github.com/ava-chen/my-project.git

git push

Push sends your local commits up to the remote, so other people (and other machines) can see them:

git push origin main

This means "push the main branch to the remote named origin." The very first time you push a new branch, add -u so Git remembers this pairing and lets you just type git push from then on:

git push -u origin main

git pull

Pull does the reverse — it fetches any new commits from the remote and merges them into your current branch, which is how you stay up to date with everyone else's work:

git pull origin main

Make it a habit to git pull before you start working and before you push — it avoids a lot of avoidable merge conflicts caused by working from stale history.