How can I find the location of origin/master in git, and how do I change it?

I came to this question looking for an explanation about what the message "your branch is ahead by..." means, in the general scheme of git. There was no answer to that here, but since this question currently shows up at the top of Google when you search for the phrase "Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master'", and I have since figured out what the message really means, I thought I'd post the info here.

So, being a git newbie, I can see that the answer I needed was a distinctly newbie answer. Specifically, what the "your branch is ahead by..." phrase means is that there are files you've added and committed to your local repository, but have never pushed to the origin. The intent of this message is further obfuscated by the fact that "git diff", at least for me, showed no differences. It wasn't until I ran "git diff origin/master" that I was told that there were differences between my local repository, and the remote master.

So, to be clear:

"your branch is ahead by..." => You need to push to the remote master. Run "git diff origin/master" to see what the differences are between your local repository and the remote master repository.

Hope this helps other newbies.

(Also, I recognize that there are configuration subtleties that may partially invalidate this solution, such as the fact that the master may not actually be "remote", and that "origin" is a reconfigurable name used by convention, etc. But newbies do not care about that sort of thing. We want simple, straightforward answers. We can read about the subtleties later, once we've solved the pressing problem.)

Earl

1. Find out where Git thinks 'origin/master' is using git-remote

git remote show origin

..which will return something like..

* remote origin  URL: me@remote.example.com:~/something.git  Remote branch merged with 'git pull' while on branch master    master  Tracked remote branch    master

A remote is basically a link to a remote repository. When you do..

git remote add unfuddle me@unfuddle.com/myrepo.gitgit push unfuddle

..git will push changes to that address you added. It's like a bookmark, for remote repositories.

When you run git status, it checks if the remote is missing commits (compared to your local repository), and if so, by how many commits. If you push all your changes to "origin", both will be in sync, so you wont get that message.

2. If it's somewhere else, how do I turn my laptop into the 'origin/master'?

There is no point in doing this. Say "origin" is renamed to "laptop" - you never want to do git push laptop from your laptop.

If you want to remove the origin remote, you do..

git remote rm origin

This wont delete anything (in terms of file-content/revisions-history). This will stop the "your branch is ahead by.." message, as it will no longer compare your repository with the remote (because it's gone!)

One thing to remember is that there is nothing special about origin, it's just a default name git uses.

Git does use origin by default when you do things like git push or git pull. So, if you have a remote you use a lot (Unfuddle, in your case), I would recommend adding unfuddle as "origin":

git remote rm origingit remote add origin git@subdomain.unfuddle.com:subdomain/abbreviation.git

or do the above in one command using set-url:

git remote set-url origin git@subdomain.unfuddle.com:subdomain/abbreviation.git

Then you can simply do git push or git pull to update, instead of git push unfuddle master

I had a problem that was similar to this where my working directory was ahead of origin by X commits but the git pull was resulting in Everything up-to-date. I did manage to fix it by following this advice. I'm posting this here in case it helps someone else with a similar problem.

The basic fix is as follows:

$ git push {remote} {localbranch}:{remotebranch}

Where the words in brackets should be replaced by your remote name, your local branch name and your remote branch name. e.g.

$ git push origin master:master