Adding GitHub repository as a remote

There are two common ways to work with remote repositories:

1. New projects. You start locally, create a new repo with git init. When you've made some progress, connect the local repo to a remote to share your work with others (or to simply make a backup).

2. Existing projects. Say, you bought a new computer, and you want to continue working on your existing project, which have been synced to a remote repository already. In this case, instead of git init, you use git clone https://your-repo-url to make a local copy of the remote repository. Then, work on it as you normally would.

We're following the first approach here: we already have a local repository with our work, and now we want to connect it to GitHub.

To connect a local repository to GitHub, we need to add the GitHub repository as a remote in our local repository. A remote is essentially a bookmark that points to a URL where a repository is hosted.

The default name for the first remote is usually origin, but you can name it whatever you want. However, it's a convention to use origin for the primary remote repository.

To add a remote, we use the git remote add command, followed by the name of the remote and the URL of the repository. In our case, the command should look like this:

To confirm that the remote was added successfully, you can run git remote -v (-v is shorthand for --verbose, meaning show extra details), which will show you a list of all remotes and their URLs.

git remote -v

You should see something like this:

origin https://github.com/your-name/your-repo.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/your-name/your-repo.git (push)

Great! You've successfully connected your local repository to GitHub.