Merging a local repository to an existing remote repository

Very often happens that I start versioning some software locally and I push it remotely later :octocat:. When I decide it is the moment to keep the code safe and sound on Github, the procedure to merge a local-only repository to a fresh remote repository is not straight forward.

First we set the remote repository that we want to connect to

git remote add origin [email protected]:andregri/go-mux-routers.git

We download the main branch locally

git pull

If we print the commit graph, the local commit and the remote commit are disconnected. Usually, commits belonging to the same branch or that stem from a branch are visually connected with bars, dash and slash. This is not the case:

git log --all --graph

* commit 7bf303dcffd009abed812cf57277f4abb57c4f1f (HEAD -> master)
  Author: andregri
  Date:   Sun Dec 19 17:30:47 2021 +0100

      git init

* commit 94ee685f2a585a7a981fd9b6b7439e8ea447a415 (main, origin/main)
  Author: andregri
  Date:   Sun Dec 19 17:21:51 2021 +0100

      Initial commit

Now we rebase the local branch on top of the remote branch:

git rebase main

and the local branch is connected to the remote one:

git log --all --graph

* commit 7bf303dcffd009abed812cf57277f4abb57c4f1f (HEAD -> master)
| Author: andregri
| Date:   Sun Dec 19 17:30:47 2021 +0100
|
|     git init
|
* commit 94ee685f2a585a7a981fd9b6b7439e8ea447a415 (main, origin/main)
  Author: andregri
  Date:   Sun Dec 19 17:21:51 2021 +0100

      Initial commit

We merge the local branch master to the remote branch main to move forward the main branch.

git checkout main
git merge master

Finally, we succeeded in aligning the local repository with the remote repository and we just need to push everything:

git checkout main
git push
git branch -d master