How to see a newly created branch in a Chocolatey Fork on Github locally and subsequently push to this branch?

Question

Summary

• Github Chocolatey Repository has been forked to own Github account as Chocolatey-1
• A new branch installchocolateyservice has been created
• installchocolateyservice has been pulled
• A push to installchocolateyservice branch fails, while it works to push to the master
• git branch indicates that only the master is recognized

---

Verbose

Extra branch created in Chocolatey Fork

Other branch than master pulled

C:\chocolatey-1>git pull origin installchocolateyservice
remote: Reusing existing pack: 4611, done.
remote: Counting objects: 25, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (25/25), done.
rRemote: Total 4636 (delta 11), reused 0 (delta 0)eceiving objects: 100% (4636/4
Receiving objects: 100% (4636/4636), 21.86 MiB | 276.00 KiB/s, done.

Resolving deltas: 100% (2792/2792), done.
From github.com:030/chocolatey-1
 * branch            installchocolateyservice -> FETCH_HEAD
 * [new branch]      installchocolateyservice -> origin/installchocolateyservice

Push to installchocolateyservice branch failed

C:\chocolatey-1>git push origin installchocolateyservice
error: src refspec installchocolateyservice does not match any.
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:030/chocolatey-1.git'

Push to master works

C:\chocolatey-1>git push origin master
Everything up-to-date

Only master branch is recognized

C:\chocolatey-1>git branch
* master

C:\chocolatey-1>

Answer 1

This command

git branch
* master

doesn't show your new branch because it doesn't exist as a local branch yet, only as a remote-tracking branch. You'll be able to see it if you pass the --remotes/-r or the --all/-a option,

git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/installchocolateyservice 
  remotes/origin/master

Creating local branches from remote branches

If you wanted to create a local version of the branch, the correct way to do it would have been to use git fetch followed by a checkout, not git pull, because git pull is a fetch followed by a merge into your current branch.

So the proper command sequence is

git fetch origin
git checkout -b installchocolateyservice origin/installchocolateyservice 

Note that if you checkout a non-existent local branch X, and there is a remote-tracking branch called origin/X, then a new local branch X will be created from origin/X and set up to track it by default. So, in other words, instead of using the above commands, you can also do

git fetch origin
git checkout installchocolateyservice

Now that you have a proper local branch, you should be able to push to the remote one:

git push origin HEAD
# Or
git push origin installchocolateyservice