how to recover from a Git remote repository deleted

Question

We had a Gitlab CE on a vm in our server.
There were 3 people working on a single repository on this Gitlab server.
This Gitlab CE vm has been deleted accidentally! These 3 people still have their local repositories with a lot of branches.
Our branching strategy was like this:
We had a Master branch and some feature branches per user.
users used to:

• pull master from remote,
• make a branch from it,
• make changes,
• push to master again (via merge requests)

Now, I have some questions:

1. Is there any way-strategy to recreate-rebuild remote repo from local ones?
2. If not, what should I do to create another remote repo and merge all commits to it?

Answer 1

• Create an empty repo in GitLab/BitBucket/GitHub.

• Add a new remote (say, another) in your current repo with the URL of the new repo. Then push your master branch commits/changes to another repo's master branch.

  $ git remote add another <new-repo-url>
  $ git remote -v                 # see if the remote is added correctly 
  $ git checkout master
  
  $ git push another master       # push the changes to another/master
  

• If you need features of another branch (say, feature) then simply checkout to the feature branch and push the changes to another repo's feature branch.

  $ git checkout feature
  $ git push another feature      # push changes to 'another' repo's 'feature' branch
  

• Push all the branches and tags to another repo.

  $ git push --all --tags another
  

N.B. Here, another represents your new repo's URL.

Answer 2

Since your remote was deleted you don't have any origin yet so you will have to checkout the "remote" branches locally and assign them the original name and than push all the branches to the remote.

If you dont want the local branches simply push the ones you need.

Here is a scrip which im using to checkout all branches and than push them to the new remote

#!/bin/bash

# add the new origin 
git remote add origin2 <url>

# loop over all the original branches and set the new remote as the new track origin
for branch in `git branch -a | grep remotes | grep -v HEAD | grep -v master `; do
    git branch --track ${branch#remotes/origin2/} $branch
done

# now push all branches and tags
git push origin2 --all    
git push origin2 --tags

---

What does the script do?

git branch -a
get a list of all the local branches

| grep remotes The branch names are : 'remotes/origin/' so this will remove the remotes from the branch names

| grep -v HEAD | grep -v master
remove the master (current branch) and HEAD which is an alias to the latest commit