Git – pull/push from multiple remote locations

git

The short: is there a way to have a git repo push to and pull from a list of remote repos (rather than a single "origin")?

The long: I often have a situation when I'm developing an app in multiple computers, with different connectivity – say a laptop while on transit, a computer "A" while I'm in a certain location, and another computer "B" while on another. Also, the laptop might have connectivity with only either "A" or "B", and sometimes both.

What I would like to is for git to always "pull" from and "push" to all the computers it can currently connect to, so it's easier to jump from one machine to the other and continue working seamlessly.

Best Answer

Doing this manually is no longer necessary, with modern versions of git! See Malvineous's solution, below.

Reproduced here:

git remote set-url origin --push --add <a remote>
git remote set-url origin --push --add <another remote>

Original answer:

This something I’ve been using for quite a while without bad consequences and suggested by Linus Torvalds on the git mailing list.

araqnid’s solution is the proper one for bringing code into your repository… but when you, like me, have multiple equivalent authoritative upstreams (I keep some of my more critical projects cloned to both a private upstream, GitHub, and Codaset), it can be a pain to push changes to each one, every day.

Long story short, git remote add all of your remotes individually… and then git config -e and add a merged‐remote. Assuming you have this repository config:

[remote "GitHub"]
    url = git@github.com:elliottcable/Paws.o.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/GitHub/*
[branch "Master"]
    remote = GitHub
    merge = refs/heads/Master
[remote "Codaset"]
    url = git@codaset.com:elliottcable/paws-o.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/Codaset/*
[remote "Paws"]
    url = git@github.com:Paws/Paws.o.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/Paws/*

… to create a merged‐remote for "Paws" and "Codaset", I can add the following after all of those:

[remote "Origin"]
    url = git@github.com:Paws/Paws.o.git
    url = git@codaset.com:elliottcable/paws-o.git

Once I’ve done this, when I git push Origin Master, it will push to both Paws/Master and Codaset/Master sequentially, making life a little easier.

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis
git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] <path>…
Description

Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.

Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.

If any optional <path>... arguments are given, only those paths are affected.

Step 1 is to show what will be deleted by using the -n option:

# Print out the list of files and directories which will be removed (dry run)
git clean -n -d

Clean Step - beware: this will delete files:

# Delete the files from the repository
git clean -f

To remove directories, run git clean -f -d or git clean -fd
To remove ignored files, run git clean -f -X or git clean -fX
To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run git clean -f -x or git clean -fx

Note the case difference on the X for the two latter commands.

If clean.requireForce is set to "true" (the default) in your configuration, one needs to specify -f otherwise nothing will actually happen.

Again see the git-clean docs for more information.

Options

-f, --force

If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to run unless given -f, -n or -i.

-x

Don’t use the standard ignore rules read from .gitignore (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, but do still use the ignore rules given with -e options. This allows removing all untracked files, including build products. This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git reset) to create a pristine working directory to test a clean build.

-X

Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.

-n, --dry-run

Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.

-d

Remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files. If an untracked directory is managed by a different Git repository, it is not removed by default. Use -f option twice if you really want to remove such a directory.

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

In the simplest terms, git pull does a git fetch followed by a git merge.

You can do a git fetch at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/. This operation never changes any of your own local branches under refs/heads, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. I have even heard of people running git fetch periodically in a cron job in the background (although I wouldn't recommend doing this).

A git pull is what you would do to bring a local branch up-to-date with its remote version, while also updating your other remote-tracking branches.

From the Git documentation for git pull:

In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.

Best Answer

Original answer:

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis

Description

Options

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

Related Topic