Git Push

Git Push

Then finally, once you’ve made all of your changes, staged them with the git add . command, and committed the changes with the git commit command, you must push the committed changes from your local repository to your remote GitHub repository. This ensures that the remote repository is brought up-to-date with your local repository.

Creating and Linking a Remote Repository

Before you can push to your remote GitHub repository, you need to first create your remote repository via GitHub as per Chapter 6.

Once you have your remote GitHub repository ready, you can add it to your local project with the following command:

git remote add origin git@github.com:your_username/your_repo_name.git

Note: Make sure to change the your_username and your_repo_name details accordingly.

This is how you can link your local Git project with your remote GitHub repository.

If you’ve read the previous chapter, you will most likely notice we are using SSH as the authentication method.

However, if you did not follow the steps from the previous chapter, you can use HTTPS rather than SSH:

git remote add origin https://github.com/your_username/your_repo_name.git

To verify your remote repository, you can run the following command:

git remote -v

Pushing Commits

To push your committed changes to the linked remote repository, you can use the git push command:

git push -u origin main

Note: In this command, -u origin main tells Git to set the main branch of the remote repository as the upstream branch within the git push command. This is the best practice when using Git as it allows the git push and git pull commands to work as intended. Alternatively, you can use --set-upstream origin main for this as well.

If you are using SSH with your SSH key uploaded to GitHub, the push command will not ask you for a password and will push your changes to GitHub straight away.

In case that you did not run the git remote add command as outlined in earlier in this chapter, you will receive the following error:

fatal: 'origin' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

This would mean that you’ve not added your GitHub repository as the remote repository. This is why we run the git remote add command to create that connection between your local repository and the remote GitHub repository.

Note that the connection would be in place if you used the git clone command to clone an existing repository from GitHub to your local machine. We will go through the git pull command in the next few chapters as well.

Checking the Remote Repository

After running the git push command, you can head over to your GitHub project and you will be able to see the commits that you’ve made locally present in remote repository on GitHub. If you were to click on the commits link, you would be able to see all commits just as if you were to run the git log command:

Now that you know how to push your latest changes from your local Git project to your GitHub repository, it’s time to learn how to pull the latest changes from GitHub to your local project.