Adding Remote Repositories

We’ve mentioned and given some demonstrations of how the git clone command implicitly adds the origin remote for you. Here’s how to add a new remote explicitly. To add a new remote Git repository as a shortname you can reference easily, run git remote add <shortname> <url>:

$ git remote
origin
$ git remote add pb https://github.com/paulboone/ticgit
$ git remote -v
origin	https://github.com/schacon/ticgit (fetch)
origin	https://github.com/schacon/ticgit (push)
pb	https://github.com/paulboone/ticgit (fetch)
pb	https://github.com/paulboone/ticgit (push)

Now you can use the string pb on the command line in lieu of the whole URL. For example, if you want to fetch all the information that Paul has but that you don’t yet have in your repository, you can run git fetch pb:

$ git fetch pb
remote: Counting objects: 43, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (36/36), done.
remote: Total 43 (delta 10), reused 31 (delta 5)
Unpacking objects: 100% (43/43), done.
From https://github.com/paulboone/ticgit
 * [new branch]      master     -> pb/master
 * [new branch]      ticgit     -> pb/ticgit

Paul’s master branch is now accessible locally as pb/master — you can merge it into one of your branches, or you can check out a local branch at that point if you want to inspect it. (We’ll go over what branches are and how to use them in much more detail in Git Branching.)