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Remote

Remote 🤔​

Often we need code changes that have been created by our fellow mates. But how do we get their changes into our repo? Or how do we push our changes to someone else repo?

It doesn't have to be remote... Often we think of remote repos as github or gitlab, but it doesn't have to be that way. If you have never used git, maybe remote is an odd term.

A remote is simply a copy of the repo somewhere else.

🤔Problem

Create a new repo, remote-git. Lets initialize it as an empty git repo using git init, and create a temp-move branch and checkout to it.

Origin​

Now to set a remote location as backup copy for our repo, we use below command

git remote add <remote_name> <remote_url>
🤔Problem

Lets add remote-git as a remote storage for our local-git. remote-git will behave as github for us.

info

Naming convention for remote :

  1. origin : This is the source of truth repo, meaning main git backup from where all other will also clone this repo.
  2. upstream : This is second source of your repo, meaning if you pull changes from some other repo, but its in not your main backup repo.

Once you have added remote, you can check your remote using

git remote -v

this will show all push and pull urls.

Push​

Now we have our remote set up, and we also have changes in our local-git. Lets backup (push) these changes to our remote storage (remote-git).

git push
🤔Problem

Lets try to push our changes from local-git to remote-git.

❌ ERROR ❌

But it wont work why because, in order to track changes from both local-git and remote-git, our local git must have a another branch which is hidden and which will track to changes of our remote branch.

Why we need another branch, because someone else might push changes to our remote.

Set tracking Info​

tracking info is set for each branch individually. Now setting tracking will have two flavours depending wether we have a remote branch available or not

  1. # Case 1: When remote tracking branch is not available => this condition arises when we create a fresh brach on local but it is not present in remote.

In such case we have to manually set tracking info.

  • first lets check all branched present in our local repo .
git branch -a
  • now lets add tracking info
git push --set-upstream-to origin master

# or

git push -u origin master

  1. # Case 2: When remote tracking branch is available => in that case git will automatically set the tracking branch for our local branch.
info

we only have to set tracking information only once

Fetch​

fetch command is used to fetch all remote git state on our local repo.

git fetch
🤔Problem

Lets add some remote changes in our remote-git, and lets try to fetch the remote-state.

lets see all the changes happened when we fetch the git state.

  1. first check all the new branched that are added
git branch -avv
  1. Lets see the difference our local state with remote state
git diff origin/master

Merge​

Now we have remote changes, how to merge them in our local repo. We can use

git merge

Pull​

Well pull is a handy command which will perform 2 operation

  1. git fetch
  2. git merge

nothing else

info

you can also perform rebase while performing pull operation.

git pull --rebase
🤔Problem

Create a new branch ft1 in remote-git, and add a change ft1 remote change to ft1.md. After that pull these changes from local-git.

Wait, why does is says Already up to date., we just made changes in remote.

Because we just discuss, that each branch have it own tracking branch => which means git push or git merge or git pull works on branch basis.

so we have to make another branch with same name as on remote. But wait, we already have a remote tracking branch for ft1, which means we do not have to manually made a new branch, we can directly checkout to ft1 even it is not present, because git will AUTOMAGICALLY will create us new branch name ft1 and will sets in tracking info

🤔Problem

Checkout ft1 is local-git.

Ok, now we know about, but what about if someone else make some changes and pushed on remote and we also make changes in some place on same file. Then what happens ?