Finding out the name of the original repository you cloned from in Git

Question

git config --get remote.origin.url

In the repository root, the .git/config file holds all information about remote repositories and branches. In your example, you should look for something like:

[remote "origin"]
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
    url = server:gitRepo.git

Also, the Git command git remote -v shows the remote repository name and URL. The "origin" remote repository usually corresponds to the original repository, from which the local copy was cloned.

This is quick Bash command, that you're probably searching for, will print only a basename of the remote repository:

Where you fetch from:

basename $(git remote show -n origin | grep Fetch | cut -d: -f2-)

Alternatively where you push to:

basename $(git remote show -n origin | grep Push | cut -d: -f2-)

Especially the -n option makes the command much quicker.

I use this:

basename $(git remote get-url origin) .git

Which returns something like gitRepo. (Remove the .git at the end of the command to return something like gitRepo.git.)

(Note: It requires Git version 2.7.0 or later)

I stumbled on this question trying to get the organization/repo string from a git host like github or gitlab.

This is working for me:

git config --get remote.origin.url | sed -e 's/^git@.*:\([[:graph:]]*\).git/\1/'

It uses sed to replace the output of the git config command with just the organization and repo name.

Something like github/scientist would be matched by the character class [[:graph:]] in the regular expression.

The \1 tells sed to replace everything with just the matched characters.