The problem
Assume that you had a repo that was hosted on github, and you decided that for some reason you would like to have a copy of your repo on gitlab as well. Perhaps the obvious solution would be to add another remote to your git config.
$ git remote add gitlab [email protected]/username/my-repo.git
Pushing to both repos would then be achieved as follows:
$ git push origin master
$ git push gitlab master
Having to do this each time you wanted to push your changes could certainly become overwhelming and would likely be hard to remeber to do every time. Luckily this needn't be the case.
The solution
A good place to start implementing our solution to this problem would be to check for exsiting remotes.
$ git remote -v
The above command lists out our fetch and push remotes, which may look something like this:
origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (fetch)
origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (push)
We will then clear the origin remote just to be sure that there's nothing in our config that could cause some unexpectid issues later on.
$ git remote remove origin
Next, we will add the origin remote again, setting its single pull url and making sure to set 2 push urls.
$ git remote add origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git
$ git remote set-url --add --push origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git
$ git remote set-url --add --push origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git
We then set the upstream branch of our choosing (master in this case).
$ git fetch origin master
$ git branch --set-upstream-to origin/master
From now on, whenever we run git push origin master, git will push our changes to both remote repositories (github and gitlab). Fetching or pulling changes from origin will always refer to just the one repo (github).
Bonus points
As a final touch, we can give both of our remotes a unique name in case we ever need to explicitly push or fetch from a particular one.
$ git remote add github [email protected]:username/my-repo.git
$ git remote add gitlab [email protected]:username/my-repo.git
Once this is done, listing our remotes with git remote -v gives the following output:
github [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (fetch)
github [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (push)
gitlab [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (fetch)
gitlab [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (push)
origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (fetch)
origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (push)
origin [email protected]:username/my-repo.git (push)