Question

I have a repository on github, say testrepo. Now I’d like to set up a local repository repo that has one branch origin-master where I want do be able to edit things from the repository.

repo/origin-master  <-------->  origin/master

The cloning works fine:

mkdir repo && cd repo && git init 
# not necessary of course:
echo "master" > master && git add master && git ci -m "master"
git remote add origin [e-mail]:<username>/testrepo.git
git fetch origin
git branch --set-upstream origin-master origin/master 
git checkout origin-master
# create a new file:
echo "for origin-master" > orig-master && git add orig-master && git ci -m "orig-master"

but

git push origin 
To [e-mail]:<username>/testrepo.git
 ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to '[e-mail]:<username>/testrepo.git'
To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected
Merge the remote changes (e.g. 'git pull') before pushing again.  See the
'Note about fast-forwards' section of 'git push --help' for details.

How can I tell git that if I want to push to origin, I want to push the local branch origin-master to origin/master?

Answer 1

Set your default push behavior to upstream:

$ git config push.default upstream
$ git push origin

git push origin is the same as git push origin :, which pushes all “matching” branches by default. Your origin-master branch doesn’t match, so it tries to take the branch that does match (master) and push that to origin.

Alternatively, you can specify the push refspecs on a per-remote basis:

$ git config --add remote.origin.push origin-master:master
$ git push origin

See also git-push examples and git-config.