Push a New Branch to github that Doesn't Exist Remotely Yet

We'll make a new feature branch with:

git checkout -b new-branch

and then when we make changes and commit them, we can try to push that branch with:

git push

However, in order to get the branch to exist on github as well, we need to set the upstream of the local branch at the same time with:

git push --set-upstream origin new-branch

We can create branches with git branch {BRANCH-NAME} or git checkout -b {BRANCH-NAME}. Let's create one called js-changes with git checkout -b js-changes. Using git status shows you which branch you're currently on and git branch -vv shows the current commit and remote you're on for each branch. We can make a change on the branch by creating a function in our app.js.

app.js

// our app js code

function helloWorld() {
  alert("Hi!")
}

After saving, we stage the file with git add app.js and a commit message git commit -m "Adds hello world". Using the git log --oneline shows that we have diverged from the master branch. If we tried to push at this point, we would receive a fatal error. Using git branch -vv displays we don't have js-changes linked to any remote branch. However, Git gives us the fix in the terminal. We have to push while setting the upstream to origin js-changes. We then run git push -u origin js-changes to push it, as -u is just an alternative to --set-upstream. Now, we successfully pushed our new branch to Github and trying git branch -vv can show us that the old js-changes is now mapped to origin/js-changes.

✏️ Edit on GitHub