13 Nov 2022

Pushing to git repo with automatic upstream setup

Abstract

TL;DR ? Jump to solution

I have seen countless times how (not only) junior developers are trying to push their new branch with git CLI typically it would look like this:

Josh stopped coding, test are green, as fast as possible, he is typing git push and hits enter. Suddenly this message with some magic command occurs:

fatal: The current branch <branch-name> has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

    git push --set-upstream <origin> <branch-name>

To have this happen automatically for branches without a tracking
upstream, see 'push.autoSetupRemote' in 'git help config'.

What to do? Read whole message?
Nope, just copy, paste and run suggested command, git will push!

Two questions comes to my mind each time I see this situation:

  1. Do they just ignored fatal error without investigation?
  2. Why do they waste time to bounce off each time?

Answer to first question is clearly: yes. Solution to solve and/or automate remote setup is listed in error just below suggested command, and answer to latter… I don’t have any idea.

Problem

The problem here is that Josh created branch only locally, without proper equivalent on remote, so he have to add --set-upstream or -u flag to git push command to set upstream on remote explicitly for his local branch.

Solution

You can easily enforce creation of new branch on your remote with a single command:

git config --global --add --bool push.autoSetupRemote true

It will affect all your repositories due to --global flag and add values directly into your .gitconfig file. Described method requires git >= 2.37.0 and push.default to be one of: simple (currently default push option), upstream or current option.

Further reading

  1. Git push configuration

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