git tips: configure current branch for push and pull

When working in a standard git flow that could be quite cumbersome to enter the name of current branch each time you pull and push to remote repository.

In this post I will show how to set the name of current branch once and use commands ‘git pull’ and ‘git push’ without specifying branch name.

First we need to set current branch as default for git pull

git config push.default current

Now check the the current configuration:

git config push.default

Should print ‘current’.

We can check that branch name is now not required anymore when we push:

git push

When working on new branch for first push you need to set the remote as upstream:

git push --set-upstream origin DEV-1558-move-vk-link

This way we configured push command to automatically figure the remote branch name.

Now you can pass -u and it will also automatically set the tracking branch. (source)

git push -u

Outputs:

Everything up-to-date
Branch 'DEV-1585-correctives' set up to track remote branch 'DEV-1585-correctives' from 'origin'.

According to git push documentation the -u option add upstream (tracking) reference, used by argument-less git-pull(1) and other commands.

Now pull command will look like that

git pull