On a new laptop running Git 2.24.3 (Apple Git-128), I notice that whenever I clone a repo, I don't get a remote (and hence remote tracking branch) setup:
$ git clone git@gitlab.com/myuser/myproject.git
Cloning into 'myproject'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 70, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (70/70), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (40/40), done.
remote: Total 70 (delta 34), reused 63 (delta 27), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (70/70), 180.33 KiB | 124.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (34/34), done.
$ cd myproject
$ git status
On branch master
nothing to commit, working tree clean
$ git remote -vv
$
$ git branch -a
* master
$ ls -l .git/refs
total 0
...redacted... heads
...redacted... remotes
...redacted... replace
...redacted... tags
$ ls -l .git/refs/remotes
$
Is there some setting somewhere I need to change? It's a bit tedious having to manually create a remote each time when I always want to push back from where I cloned.
The documentation clearly says this should be happening:
Clones a repository into a newly created directory, creates remote-tracking branches for each branch in the cloned repository (visible using git branch -r), and creates and checks out an initial branch that is forked from the cloned repository's currently active branch.
I'm getting the active branch checked out, but no remote.
So the problem turns out to be that you are using git filter-repo. That can indeed remove your remote (as discussed, for example, here: How to modify remote history with git filter-repo?).