Pushing To A Differently-Named Branch

Sometimes it’s necessary to push a local git branch (for example, main) to a remote branch with a different name (for example, master).

In this situation, running git push will usually cause an error:

fatal: The upstream branch of your current branch does not match
the name of your current branch.  To push to the upstream branch
on the remote, use

    git push origin HEAD:master

If you can, prefer solving this by renaming the remote branch to match your local branch so that git push works as expected again.

If you can’t rename the remote branch, you’ll probably get tired of typing out git push origin HEAD:master each time you push. I recommend setting the git push strategy for the affected repository to “upstream”:

git config push.default upstream

The “upstream” strategy always pushes the current local branch to its upstream branch and does not check that the local and upstream branch names match. The shorter git push command will now work again.

One caveat: if you previously relied on git push automatically creating upstream branches for you, you’ll have to be a little bit more explicit when using the upstream push strategy:

fatal: The current branch new-branch has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

    git push --set-upstream origin new-branch

I create branches much less frequently than I update them, so I consider this trade-off acceptable.