til / Automatically creating a remote git branch

If you’ve ever tried pushing a new git branch to a remote host, you’ve probably seen this error:

fatal: The current branch my-awesome-branch has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

    git push --set-upstream origin my-awesome-branch

This means that there is no corresponding branch on the remote host. To get around this, we can, as the error says, use:

git push -u origin HEAD

This will push the current branch and set the upstream. -u is the shorthand command for --set-upstream in the error. HEAD is a shorter way of telling git the current branch name, which is handy if you have long branch names.

But, as of git v2.37 we can have Git handle this for us using autoSetupRemote.

git config --global push.autoSetupRemote true

This updates your global git configuration and allows git push to create a remote branch automatically.