Question

I am trying to follow along Michael Hartl’s Rails tutorial but I’ve run across an error.

I signed up at GitHub, issued a new SSH key, and created a new repository. But when I enter the next line into the terminal, I get the following error:

Parkers-MacBook-Pro:.ssh ppreyer$ git remote add origin [e-mail]:ppreyer/first_app.git
fatal: remote origin already exists.

Just wondered if anybody else has run across this problem?

Answer 1

Short version:

You should just update the existing remote:

git remote set-url origin [e-mail]:ppreyer/first_app.git

Long version:

As the error message indicates, there is already a remote configured with the same name. So you can either add the new remote with a different name or update the existing one if you don’t need it.

To add a new remote, called for example github instead of origin (which obviously already exists in your system), do the following:

git remote add github [e-mail]:ppreyer/first_app.git

Remember though, everywhere in the tutorial you see "origin" you should replace it with "github". For example $ git push origin master should now be $ git push github master.

However, if you want to see what that already existing origin remote is, you can do a $ git remote -v. If you think this is there by some error, you can update it like so:

git remote set-url origin [e-mail]:ppreyer/first_app.git