What is "origin" in Git?

Question

When I run:

git push origin branchname 

What exactly is origin and why do I have to type it before the branch name?

Answer 1

origin is an alias on your system for a particular remote repository. It's not actually a property of that repository.

By doing

git push origin branchname 

you're saying to push to the origin repository. There's no requirement to name the remote repository origin: in fact the same repository could have a different alias for another developer.

Remotes are simply an alias that store the URL of repositories. You can see what URL belongs to each remote by using

git remote -v 

In the push command, you can use remotes or you can simply use a URL directly. An example that uses the URL:

git push [email protected]:git/git.git master 

Answer 2

origin is not the remote repository name. It is rather a local alias set as a key in place of the remote repository URL.

It avoids the user having to type the whole remote URL when prompting a push.

This name is set by default and for convention by Git when cloning from a remote for the first time.

This alias name is not hard coded and could be changed using following command prompt:

git remote rename origin mynewalias 

Take a look at http://git-scm.com/docs/git-remote for further clarifications.