Question

I’m new to version control and git. I’m confused by git push [alias] [branch].

What is the difference between an alias and branch?

Answer 1

[alias] is your Primary remote repository‘s alias. And [branch] is your branch name of the project.
For example, I have a repo(let’s say, yourRepo) on github, and its primary remote repository is [e-mail]:user/yourRepo.git.
You’ll often do

git remote add origin [e-mail]:user/yourRepo.git  

to add it to your local repo. Then you can push your update to github by

git push origin master

Here origin is often used as alias for primary remote repository.

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There’re still some other type of alias for git. For example, you can do

git config alias.com commit

to make com alias to commit. The alias here is not the [alias] in your question. I just mentioned it by the way. Maybe you’ll like it. 😉