What is “git remote add …” and “git push origin master”?

Question

Quite often, Git and Rails looks like magic... such as in the first chapter of Rails 3 Tutorial book, it talks about Git:

git remote add origin git@github.co         


        

Answer 1

Have a look at the syntax for adding a remote repo.

git remote add origin 

Example:

git remote add origin git@github.com:peter/first_app.git

Let us dissect the command :

git remote this is used to manage your Central servers for hosting your git repositories.

May be you are using Github for your central repository stuff. I will give you a example and explain the git remote add origin command

Suppose I am working with GitHub and BitBucket for the central servers for the git repositories and have created repositories on both the websites for my first-app project.

Now if I want to push my changes to both these git servers then I will need to tell git how to reach these central repositories. So I will have to add these,

For GitHub

git remote add gh_origin https://github.com/user/first-app-git.git

And For BitBucket

git remote add bb_origin https://user@bitbucket.org/user/first-app-git.git

I have used two variables ( as far it is easy for me to call them variables ) gh_origin ( gh FOR GITHUB ) and bb_origin ( bb for BITBUCKET ) just to explain you we can call origin anything we want.

Now after making some changes I will have to send(push) all these changes to central repositories so that other users can see these changes. So I call

Pushing to GitHub

git push gh_origin master

Pushing to BitBucket

git push bb_origin master

gh_origin is holding value of https://github.com/user/first-app-git.git and bb_origin is holding value of https://user@bitbucket.org/user/first-app-git.git

This two variables are making my life easier

as whenever I need to send my code changes I need to use this words instead of remembering or typing the URL for the same.

Most of the times you wont see anything except than origin as most of the times you will deal with only one central repository like Github or BitBucket for example.