Multiple Remote URLs

When you clone a git repo to your machine, it creates a "remote" called origin, pointing to wherever you cloned the repo from. This allows you to use commands like git fetch and git pull to download updates from the same source, and git push to upload changes back to that source.

In some cases, you may want a repo to have multiple "remotes". There could be any number of reasons for this, I do it in order to maintain backup copies of my own repos in case the repo's "primary" server is unavailable.

There are a few ways to handle this.

Multiple Remotes

Repo directories can have multiple "remotes". As a (contrived) example ...

$ git remote -v
foks    foks://(redacted)/jms1.info (fetch)
foks    foks://(redacted)/jms1.info (push)
github  git@github.com:kg4zow/jms1.info (fetch)
github  git@github.com:kg4zow/jms1.info (push)

With this kind of configuration, you can pull or push commits from either remote, as needed. I've done this with repos in the past, usually as part of a migration from one git hosting service to another.

For example, to copy the repo from FOKS to Github, I could do something like this:

git fetch -p foks
git push --all github
git push --tags github

One problem with doing this is, you have to keep track of which remotes have which commits, and be sure to use the correct remote names with your commands.

Setting this up

Assuming you've cloned a repo from a remote called origin ...

• If you're creating a new repo on a remote host (such as Github), be sure to create an empty repo. If it offers you any options to set up a README or LICENSE file, don't use them. These options work by starting an empty repo and adding a commit which adds those files. Pushing an existing repo into a non-empty repo is ... not imposisble, but it's not simple (you have to "merge" the two).

• On your local machine, use git remote add to create a new remote.

  git rmeote add github git@github.com:kg4zow/jms1.info
  

• Many services (like Github) will set a repo's "primary" branch to the first branch pushed into the repo. In order to avoid later issues, your first push should contain only the branch that you consider to be "primary".

  I normally use main as the primary branch name in my repos.

  git checkout main
  git push github main
  

• Push the other branches, and any tags.

  git push --all github
  git push --tags github
  

At this point, the new github remote contains every commit, branch, and tag that the .git/ directory on your workstation knows about.

Multiple URLS in the Same Remote

Another option is to add multiple "push" URLs to the same remote.

With this configuration, every time you push commits to that remote, it will push them to all of the URLs, one after the other.

I do this with most of my personal repos, in order to have "backup copies" of my repos in case their "primary servers" are not available.

Setting this up

As an example, this is how I set up the repo holding the jms1.info site's source code. (These are the actual commands I typed on my workstation when I added Github as a second URL for this repo on 2025-10-17.)

• Create the Github repo.

  gh repo create --public kg4zow/jms1.info
  

• Clone the existing FOKS repo to a new directory.

  cd ~/git/
  git clone foks://(redacted)/jms1.info jms1.info
  

• Add the Github URL to the existing remote.

  cd ~/git/jms1.info/
  git remote set-url --add origin git@github.com:kg4zow/jms1.info
  

• Push the contents to Github.

  git push main
  git push --all
  git push --tags
  

  Note that these commands don't require a "remote" name, because the repo (the directory on my workstation) only has one remote, called origin.

  Also note that these git push commands did try to push commits to FOKS. However, nothing was actually pushed because the FOKS server already had the commits and tags I was pushing.

From this point forward, whenever I make changes and push commits, the git push command pushes those changes to both locations, one after the other.