If you have push access to an upstream repository and want to avoid accidental push, checkout the simple solution below.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilities; it’s choosing the ones you want.

Let’s set the context I will call the original repository as upstream My fork for that repository will be called as origin 90% of times I push to origin and then create pull request, but few times I push directly to upstream(create new branch or update existing one).

Now, you want to setup your git in such a way that you want to prevent accidental push to upstream but you want to fetch from the same

Let’s add remote first

$ git remote add upstream git@github.com:fabric8-services/fabric8-wit.git

now let’s check list of remotes

$ git remote -v
origin     git@github.com:pranavgore09/fabric8-wit.git (fetch)
origin     git@github.com:pranavgore09/fabric8-wit.git (push)
upstream   git@github.com:fabric8-services/fabric8-wit.git (fetch)
upstream   git@github.com:fabric8-services/fabric8-wit.git (push)

See that, when we add a remote, git configures the URL for push and fetch differently. That helps us in blocking push only.

now we just want to run following to update URL for pushing to upstream

$ git remote set-url --push upstream DISABLED

see the change in remote list now

$ git remote -v
origin     git@github.com:pranavgore09/fabric8-wit.git (fetch)
origin     git@github.com:pranavgore09/fabric8-wit.git (push)
upstream   git@github.com:fabric8-services/fabric8-wit.git (fetch)
upstream   DISABLED (push)

and when you try to push to upstream it will fail with error saying DISABLED does not appear to be a git repository and that’s how you have just taken care of accidental push to upstream.

Now its the time you want to push to upstream then just do the following

$ git remote set-url --push upstream git@github.com:fabric8-services/fabric8-wit.git

Don’t forget to reset push URL after you are done pushing 😉

More?

You can add a pre-push hook that will execute defined shell script. Read git-hooks

Note: This blog is a copy of my own medium blog .

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