What is the difference between git push and git pull?

Question

I just stumbled over something peculiar today. I asked a co-worker at my summer job to help me set up a new remote git repo for my code and there was a lot of confusion about what he did and what I wanted to do. I asked him to send over his config to be able to see the path to his remote and found out that he didn't have a remote. When I asked him about this he explained his workflow like this:

1. Change something locally
2. Commit
3. Move to remote dir
4. git pull c:\localdir

So instead of pushing to a remote he constantly pulled from his local repo to the one on our server. Sort of working backwards. When I confronted him about this he asked me what the difference was and I could not really answer him, but I think there are something right?

So my question to you all is: What is the difference in pushing to a remote and pulling from a remote?

Answer 1

Pushing to a remote : send some commits you have to a another git repo. The git repo is considered as "remote", but it can be a repo in another folder of your hard drive. pulling from a remote : get some commits from a remote repo and merge them in your current HEAD (your current checkout of your repo)

Your coworker might have use pull instead of push because your repository might not have been available (no git daemon running, or gitweb, or ssh server on), but his was avalaible from your computer. As it is a server, he might not want to expose a git daemon/service which could be a vector of attack.

But if your repository was shared/available, he would just have been able to do :

1. change something locally
2. commit
3. push to your repository

Answer 2

In my view you can either let users push their commits to some repository that's considered to be "the master", or you let them send pull requests to a single user that has permission to modify said "master".

Github, for example, won't let non-contributors push to the repository, but will allow them to send pull requests, so that the contributors can integrate their changes.