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Mohammad Karmi
Mohammad Karmi

Reputation: 1465

git set-upstream-to=origin/master (local copy of remote)

I have read many answers about "origin/master" where they say it's a local copy of the remote origin of branch master. I'm confused when I read about set-upstream-to where it should refer to remote branch master , so can anyone explain why set-upstream-to reference to local copy instead of remote ? like git push origin master not git push origin/master

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3896

Answers (1)

Tim Biegeleisen
Tim Biegeleisen

Reputation: 522752

You seem to have some confusion about references in the basic Git commands. And you should have confusion, because it's confusing.

The local branch master, which exists only in your local Git repo, is in what you do most of your actual development work. Similarly, there is also a branch called master which exists on the remote. Now, for the confusion, there is a third branch called origin/master. This is a local branch, which exists on your local repo. It exists mainly to serve as a proxy for the true remote master branch. Whenever you sync with the remote master branch, locally you are actually using origin/master.

Doing git pull origin master is actually identical to this (assuming you are using the merge strategy by default):

git fetch origin
git merge origin/master

The first step, git fetch origin, updates the local tracking branch origin/master with the latest changes, such that it mirrors the true master branch on the remote. Then, it does a merge into your local master branch using origin/master. Here is a brief summary:

master        | the master branch (either local or remote)
origin master | the master branch on the remote (as in the git pull command)
origin/master | local tracking branch for master which mirrors the remote version

So, keeping in mind that origin/master is the actual branch which tracks the true remote master branch, we can tell Git to use origin/master as the tracking branch via:

# from local master branch
git --set-upstream-to origin/master

Note that if you create or checkout master locally, Git typically would create origin/master as the default tracking branch behind the scenes. So, in practice, you probably won't have to use --set-upstream-to very often.

Upvotes: 4

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