Remotes in GitHub

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How do I share my changes with others on the web?

Objectives

• Explain what remote repositories are and why they are useful.

• Push to or pull from a remote repository.

So far, our work was restricted to the local machine. But if you want to share your repositories with your colleagues, it would be nice to have a central place where everyone could make their repositories available for comments, suggestions, and collaboration. GitHub is a service that allows us to do that.

If you have not created GitHub account, please go to github.com and do it now.

Now we want to create repository that will be a remote copy of our local TheDataShop repository.

#From your GitHub account:
Click on 'new repository'
Repository name: 'TheDataShop'
Type: public
Click on 'create repository'

You have just created remote empty TheDataShop repository. This repository has a specific identifier URL associated with it. As soon as the repository is created, GitHub displays a page with that URL and some information on how to configure your local repository:

This effectively does the following on GitHub’s servers:

$ mkdir TheDataShop
$ cd TheDataShop
$ git init

Our local repository still contains our earlier work, but the remote repository on GitHub doesn’t contain any files yet.

HTTPS vs. SSH

We use HTTPS here because it does not require additional configuration. After the workshop you may want to set up SSH access, which is a bit more secure, by following one of the great tutorials from GitHub, Atlassian/BitBucket and GitLab (this one has a screencast).

We now let our local machine know that we have a remote location for our local repository.

#on your local machine
$ git remote add origin URL

The name origin is a local nickname for your remote repository. We could use something else if we wanted to, but origin is by far the most common choice.

Once the nickname origin is set up, this command will push the changes from our local repository to the repository on GitHub:

$ git push -u origin master

This is it! You just made your local TheDataShop repository available on GitHub for everyone to access. You are now in position to share your work and collaborate with others. How cool is this?

Optional Activity

Suppose you want to add another file to your repository. Add your git_test folder to your local directory ‘TheDataShop’ and then push the changes to Github.

Key Points

• A local Git repository can be connected to one or more remote repositories.

• Use the HTTPS protocol to connect to remote repositories until you have learned how to set up SSH.

• git push copies changes from a local repository to a remote repository.

• git pull copies changes from a remote repository to a local repository.