How to change/delete/remove an existing remote URL in Git?

Welcome to my another blog on GitHub. I’m a fan of it and trying to dive deeper and deeper into it so as to get the best out of it. I try to simplify things as much as possible so bear with my posts if they sound boring.

So today I had a task to migrate my GitHub repo to Bitbucket so I made all the setup in the bucket and created a new repo there. However, now to continue with all the operations of GitHub and to make sure I do all the remote or server operations on Bitbucket instead of GitHub I had to set the remote URL of Bitbucket repo instead of GitHub in my local Git.

Note: remote means github.com or any other sites like it where we can push our code online and alias mean a nickname for the URLs of the repository.

There are 3 ways to do it.

Actually there is really a one way that you’ll need but I’m trying to hand you over with other ways which may come handy at some later point of time.

1. Update or change the URL

This is a quite a straightforward way to do it. Just one command and you are done.

The command is: git remote set-url < alias-name> <url>

2. Delete the existing remote alias (origin) and create it again.

Step1: Deleting the remote alias.

The command to remove or delete existing remote is pretty straightforward.

git remote remove <alias-name>

Step2: Adding the remote URL(aka adding origin)

git remote add <alias-name> <remote-url>

3. Adding the remote URL with different alias name and use it.

This is also a simple step and can be useful if you are in a need to push your code to more than one remote. Maybe a need to push the code on both GitHub and Bitbucket. Who knows when this can come handy?

git remote add <new-alias-name> <new-remote-url>

So that’s all we gotta do. Few simple git commands that can save you get your work done. I’ll be up with more content on GitHub, so stay tuned.