git- Creating a branch which will be pushed to a remote later

Question

I have a script which automatically creates a new branch with a name based on external information (JIRA ticket). I don't want to create the remote branch until I've committed and pushed some code, but I don't want to have to do "git push --set-upstream origin"

In other words, I want to set the upstream before I push.

git checkout -b mybranch
git <do-something-to-prepare origin/mybranch without talking to origin>
<do work>
git commit -a -m "Made my changes."
git push

I've tried:

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/mynewbranch

This results in:

error: the requested upstream branch 'origin/mynewbranch' does not exist.

Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

You can do this using the following commands:

git config branch.mybranch.remote origin
git config branch.mybranch.merge refs/heads/mybranch

This essentially configures the same thing as --set-upstream-to without checking that the upstream branch already exists first.

The next step is to change the push.default option, which currently (Git 1.9) defaults to matching (the documentation says this default will change to simple in Git 2.0). Using matching won't do what you want because there is no matching branch at the upstream remote yet. So:

git config push.default simple

You can set this globally (for all your repositories) using the --global switch.

After doing this, a

git push

will push the current branch (and only the current branch) to its upstream (which you set above), creating the upstream branch if necessary.

Answer 2

You can use the -u option when you push to track your local branch

git push -u origin myBranch

http://csurs.csr.uky.edu/cgi-bin/man/man2html?1+git-push