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Kemigisa Lailah Grant
Kemigisa Lailah Grant

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What happens when you add a wrong "remote origin URL" to your GitHub project?

I must mention, this just happened to me this evening on Tuesday 11th February 2020 and I spent about 15 minutes or so working on that.

A friend has been asking me for some code that was just locally on my PC, so after he persisted, I just realised all I could do is put it on Github for him to find.

For those that don't know how to push a local project to GitHub, hopefully, these following can help:-

  1. Go to your GitHub account on your browser, login(if you aren't logged in).
  2. Create a repository with the same name as that of your local project e.g cats
  3. Open your terminal & browse to your project directory e.g
lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ 
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then do the following commands

git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/lailahgrant/cats.git
git push -u origin master
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Now back to our main question!!!
let's say
instead of the above, you end up doing the following,

git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/lailahgrant/cat
git push -u origin master
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I know this can happen because it happened to me today and this is what I did :-

lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ git remote add origin https://github.com/lailahgrant/ikowap
lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ git push -u origin master
Username for 'https://github.com': lailahgrant
Password for 'https://lailahgrant@github.com':
remote: Repository not found.
fatal: repository 'https://github.com/lailahgrant/ikowap/' not found
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Then after realising my mistake, I now tried to put the correct URL and I got the following errors:-

lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ git remote add origin https://github.com/lailahgrant/ikowapi.git
fatal: remote origin already exists.
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At this point I was so desperate & I tried every solution in the --help but all in vain.

I finally got a solution from the popular saviour - Stack overflow and all I did was run the following:-

lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ git remote rm origin
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The above command removed all the remote origin URLs I had put.

Now it was safe for me to run the other commands...

lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ git remote add origin https://github.com/lailahgrant/ikowapi.git
lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ git push -u origin master
Username for 'https://github.com': lailahgrant
Password for 'https://lailahgrant@github.com': 
Counting objects: 185, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (180/180), done.
Writing objects: 100% (185/185), 1005.56 KiB | 3.63 MiB/s, done.
Total 185 (delta 32), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (32/32), done.
To https://github.com/lailahgrant/ikowapi.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
Branch 'master' set up to track remote branch 'master' from 'origin'.
lailah@DESKTOP-VDD8TTR:/mnt/e/ikowapi$ 
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Hopefully you found this helpful, Thanks for reading through

Top comments (10)

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dorothykiz1 profile image
dorothykiz1

Thanks for this..

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fannynyayic profile image
Fanny Nyayic

Thank you!

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joelcrawford14 profile image
Joel Crawford

Thanks for that

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lailahgrant profile image
Kemigisa Lailah Grant

πŸ€—πŸ€—πŸ€—thank you everyone for your feedback. I’m humbled. 🎈🎈

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stuartelimu profile image
stue

Wow, this could happen to anyone, thanks a bunch .

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lailahgrant profile image
Kemigisa Lailah Grant

You’re welcome dear, thanks for your time

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amkayondo profile image
Kayondo Edward

Awesome lilian πŸ€Ύβ€β™€οΈπŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰

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Phyllis Nabangi

PerfectπŸ‘ŒπŸΎ

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cnkesiga profile image
Bill Clinton #MP - πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¬

Awesome πŸŽ‰

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livmadrid profile image
Olivia Boynton

THANK YOU!