How can I push a local Git branch to a remote with a different name easily?

Question

I've been wondering if there's an easy way to push and pull a local branch with a remote branch with a different name without always specifying both names.

For example:

$ git clone myrepo.git
$ git checkout -b newb
$ ...
$ git commit -m "Some change"
$ git push origin newb:remote_branch_name

Now if someone updates remote_branch_name, I can:

$ git pull

And everything is merged / fast-forwarded. However, if I make changes in my local "newb", I can't:

$ git push

Instead, I have to:

% git push origin newb:remote_branch_name

Seems a little silly. If git-pull uses git-config branch.newb.merge to determine where to pull from, why couldn't git-push have a similar config option? Is there a nice shortcut for this or should I just continue the long way?

Answer 1

Sure. Just set your push.default to upstream to push branches to their upstreams (which is the same that pull will pull from, defined by branch.newb.merge), rather than pushing branches to ones matching in name (which is the default setting for push.default, matching).

git config push.default upstream

Note that this used to be called tracking not upstream before Git 1.7.4.2, so if you're using an older version of Git, use tracking instead. The push.default option was added in Git 1.6.4, so if you're on an older version than that, you won't have this option at all and will need to explicitly specify the branch to push to.

Answer 2

When you do the initial push add the -u parameter:

git push -u origin my_branch:remote_branch

Subsequent pushes will go where you want.

EDIT:

As per the comment, that only sets up pull.

git branch --set-upstream

should do it.

Answer 3

The command by Adam is now deprecated. You can use:

git branch --set-upstream-to origin/my_remote_branch my_local_branch

to set the upstream branch of my_local_branch to origin/my_remote_branch.

Answer 4

Here's the process that has worked for me.

git clone original-repo-url
git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin new-repo-url

Now your new repo will be ‘origin’ and the original repo is ‘upstream’. Confirm it by running git remote -v. (Side note: Upstream is used to fetch from the original repo - in order to keep your local copy in sync with the project you want to contribute to - and origin is used to pull and push since you can contribute to your own repo).

git push origin master

Now your new remote repo's master (on Github) will be in-sync with the original master, but it won't have any of the feature branches.

git rebase upstream/branch-name
git push origin master

Rebase is a smart merge. Then push to master again and you’ll see the selected feature branch as master on the new repo.

Optional:

git remote rm upstream
git remote add upstream new-repo-url