What is the difference between "git push origin <branch>" and "git flow feature publish"?

Question

Both of these commands will push the code to the respected branch so that the other developers can work on that branch. Then what is the exact difference between these two commands?

Answer 1

When doing git flow feature publish a few additional commands are run in the background by git-flow:

Pushes the branch
git push origin my-feature

Configures the remote property on the branch
git config “branch.my-feature.remote” “origin”

Configures the merge property on the branch
git config “branch.my-feature.merge” “refs/heads/my-feature”

Checks out the branch
git checkout “my-feature”

Answer 2

I didn't hear about git-flow before this question but it is a collection of Git extensions to provide high-level repository operations for Vincent Driessen's branching model, it can be found on github

That basically means that you can not use it unless you install the add on.

So, git push origin works every where, git flow feature publish only works on systems that have the additional feature installed.