Pushing Code with Git

Learning Goals

• Create a local repository
• Create a remote repository
• Connect the local repository and the remote repository with git remote
• Push code up to the remote repo with git push

Introduction

You've seen how valuable remotes are for getting software. Now we can take a look at the other side of the transaction: how we synchronize our local repository to a remote repository using git remote and git push.

Once your code is on a remote, it's backed up — which is always a good thing. Also, once you push to a remote, you can choose whether to let others fork or clone and benefit from it.

You're already quite familiar with using the git push command to push your work on labs up to GitHub so you can submit it using CodeGrade. But what happens when you need to push up work that doesn't already exist on GitHub?

In this lesson, we'll learn how we can set up remote repositories on GitHub for any projects we work on. Specifically, we'll learn how to get a new repo set up on our local drive, create a remote repo for it on GitHub, connect the local and remote repositories, and push our code up to the remote repo on GitHub.

Create a Local Repo

Let's review the process for creating a local repository:

1. First, we want to create a folder for our repository, which we'll call my_new_directory. In the terminal, navigate to the ~/Development/code/se-prep directory (or wherever you are storing your code for the course) and type mkdir my_new_directory.

2. To navigate into this new folder, type cd my_new_directory. Your terminal should display my_new_directory, indicating that you are now inside of the new folder. Open the directory in VS Code by typing code ..

3. Next, we need to create a new file named README.md. You can do this in the terminal, by typing touch README.md, or in VS Code, by choosing File -> New File.

4. We can directly type in content for our README file in VS Code, but we can also use our terminal skills to add content. So, in the terminal, type echo "This is my readme file" >> README.md. If you've got the README file open in VS Code, the new text will appear!

5. Now that we've got some basic content, we can initialize our local repository. In your terminal, type git init. Your terminal should show that an 'empty Git repository' has been initialized.

6. Type git add README.md (or git add .) to stage the new README.md file so it will be tracked by git.

7. Now, type git commit -m "Initialize git". This will create the first commit for this local repository.

Create a Remote Repository on GitHub

There are a few steps to follow to create a remote repository on GitHub.

1. Go to: github.com/new, while logged in to GitHub.

2. Enter a name for your repository in the "Repository name" field. You can name it whatever you'd like; be creative! You can leave the remaining options as they are — the default options are fine. Click the green 'Create repository' button.

3. After you create the remote repository, you should see a "Quick setup" box at the top of the page. Make sure the 'SSH' option is selected, then click the copy button next to the repo URL to copy the URL. (We'll use this in the next section.)

Behind the scenes, GitHub has essentially git init'd a blank directory.

Connect the Local Repository to the Remote Repository

We learned in the previous lesson that the git remote command will list the remotes available to our Git repo. If you run that command now, ...nothing happens. This is because we haven't set our remote repo as the remote for our local repo yet. Doing so is a simple matter of assigning the URL we copied above to a remote name.

We also learned that Git uses the remote name origin by default when we clone an existing repo from GitHub. We verified that by running git remote -v, which showed that the remote name origin was pointing to the repo on GitHub that we cloned. We'll stick to that convention here.

You should still have your remote Git info copied from GitHub. To set the remote, type git remote add origin followed by a space, then paste in the URL. It will look something like this:

$ git remote add origin [email protected]:your-github-username/my-new-repo.git

The command above creates a remote called origin and points it to your remote repo on GitHub.

Let's use git remote -v (recall that the -v is for "verbose") to verify that we successfully set our remote:

$ git remote -v
View existing remotes
origin  [email protected]:your-github-username/my-new-repo.git (fetch)
origin  [email protected]:your-github-username/my-new-repo.git (push)

We did it! We're now set up to push our code.

Send Code to the Remote Repo with git push

Now that we have added a remote repo, we need to send our latest work to it using git push. This command will push all the local, committed work to the remote repository.

The git push command takes two arguments. The first is the name of the remote repo. Remember, origin is just an alias or "short name" that refers to the repository's URL. You don't actually have to enter the repository URL. Instead, you can just use origin. The second argument is the name of the remote branch you want to send code to. We're going to push to our remote repository's default branch.

If you configured Git using the instructions given earlier in Software Engineering Prep, your default branch's name will be main. You can verify this by running:

$ git branch --show-current

Then, to push your code up to GitHub, run this command:

$ git push -u origin main

The first time you push code up to a newly-added remote repository, using the -u flag will tell Git to "save" the remote repository as the default push destination for your current branch. What this means is that, for every subsequent push from the main branch, you will only need to run git push.

Conclusion

Being able to add Git remotes allows you to back up your local repository to a remote server. To review, the process is:

• create a local repo and run git init to start tracking it
• create a remote repo on GitHub
• run git remote add origin your-remote-repository-URL to tie your local repo to the remote repo on GitHub
• use git add and git commit to save your changes
• use git push to push the changes up to the remote repo

With these few steps, you'll be able to get your project up to GitHub in minutes!

Resources

• GitHub guide on pushing