17 Aug 2012
Some doco for my work mates, and others learners of git…
When I was starting with git (many moons ago), learning to pull from a remote repository was easy. But the book I read didn’t explain how to push to a remote repository. There was lots of doco on pushing to github, but I wanted to push and pull between my own repositories. When I pushed, I got messages saying warning: updating the current branch, and sometimes I’d have to manually clean up the remote branch - yuk.
localbox% git push remotebox master
Counting objects: 1, done.
Writing objects: 100% (1/1), 252 bytes, done.
Total 1 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: warning: updating the current branch
To sonia@remotebox.net:/home/sonia/dotfiles
f387640..13740c5 master -> master
Then I learned about bare repositories. Sweet, now I could cleanly push to (bare) remote repositories:
# convention with bare repositories is .git suffix
remotebox% git clone --bare dotfiles dotfiles.git
Cloning into bare repository 'dotfiles.git'...
done.
But what if you want to push to a non-bare repo? Firewalls mean you often have to hop across several machines using ssh tunnels, and setting up bare repositories all over the place is ‘non-optimal’. Or, you want to push between laptops. Or, whatever…
Here’s a recipe - just push to a dummy branch (I usually call it ‘push’), then do a normal merge on the remote:
# I'm on localbox and I want to push to remotebox, which isn't bare
# git br -a shows me all the remote branches:
localbox% git br -a
* master
remotes/bourke/master
remotes/bourke/foo
remotes/bourke/bar
# pushing to master, foo or bar will give problems, let's push to 'push'
localbox% git push remotebox master:push
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To sonia@remotebox.net:/home/sonia/dotfiles
* [new branch] master -> push
# let's look at that command:
% git push remotebox master:push
^ ^ ^
remote | ^
from |
to
# ie I'm pushing from master branch to the push branch on remotebox
On the remotebox, merge in the push:
remotebox% git br -a # check all my branches
* master
foo
bar
push
remotebox% git co master # checkout master
remotebox% git merge push # merge push into master
remotebox% git br -d push # cleanup
Et Voilà! Done.
Update
After a bit more reading on git, I realised that there is another solution. You can push to any branch on a non-bare repository, as long as that branch isn’t currently checked out on the remote.
PS I have lots of shortcuts in my ~/.gitconfig, like co and br. Saves typing!
[color]
ui = auto
[color "branch"]
current = green
local = yellow
remote = red
[color "diff"]
meta = blue bold
frag = magenta bold
old = red bold
new = green bold
[alias]
ci = commit
co = checkout
st = status
br = branch
sb = show-branch
sbs = show-branch --sha1-name
gr = log --graph --oneline --left-right
cl = clean -x -d -f
dt = difftool
difft = difftool
[push]
default = matching
[receive]
denyCurrentBranch = warn