How do I push a new local branch to a remote Git repository and track it too?

Question

I want to be able to do the following:

1. Create a local branch based on some other (remote or local) branch (via git branch or git checkout -b)

2. Push the local branch to the remote repository (publish), but make it trackable so git pull and git push will work immediately.

How do I do that?

I know about --set-upstream in Git 1.7, but that is a post-creation action. I want to find a way to make a similar change when pushing the branch to the remote repository.

Answer 1

In Git 1.7.0 and later, you can checkout a new branch:

git checkout -b <branch> 

Edit files, add and commit. Then push with the -u (short for --set-upstream) option:

git push -u origin <branch> 

Git will set up the tracking information during the push.