Pushing Code to GitHub

When you create a remote repository on GitHub, it will initially be empty. You will need a way to get your local repository to the remote repository on GitHub.

Git provides a convenient way to make this happen:

• You will need to add the link of the remote repository to a local repository.
• You will then push your code in the local repository to the remote one.

The git remote and git push commands let us do this, respectively.

Note: When you’re done configuring the new remote GitHub repository, you will be redirected to a page that will contain all the relevant links you will need to set up the repository locally.

The git remote command

The git remote command allows Git to track remote repositories and connects local repositories to those remote ones. When we create a new remote repository on GitHub, we can provide its link to our local Git repository along with a reference name to that link, which we can use for our convenience.

For example, let’s say we want to add our remote repository to the local one. Therefore, the command we will enter in the terminal will be:

git remote add <name> <url_to_remote_repository>

We will name our remote repository link origin:

git remote add origin <url_to_remote_repository>

Note: The name origin is essentially a more human-readable way to link to the remote repository instead of always having to use the actual URL. origin is simply a conventional name, but we can use any other name as well.

To verify that the remote link works, we can use the plain command git remote, and it will list all the remote repositories we have added. If the name origin is present in the list, we will know that the remote repository is accessible for us to retrieve or send code for our local repository.