Pushing to a remote Git repositoryEdit

Tips

Generally anonymous public checkouts (clones) are served via the git-daemon (see man git-daemon) and accessed using URLs that start with git://.

Write access, on the other hand, is generally performed over SSH.

So if you plan to push modifications back to a remote Git repository then you should clone it using an ssh:// URL and not a git:// one. If you mistakenly make the wrong type of clone and then try to push you will get a message like this:

fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
error: failed to push to 'git://git.example.com/repo'

Perform a git config -l | grep remote or git remote show origin to see how access to the remote repository is configured. You'll see that the access URL uses the git protocol ('git://git.example.com/repo').

To correct the problem you can use the git config command to update the URL to the SSH equivalent:

git config remote.origin.url ssh://git.example.com/pub/git/path_to_public_repos/repo.git

Note how the publicly-visible path to your repository for anonymous users is not necessarily the same as the absolute path that you'll use when accessing over SSH, and this depends on the parameters you pass to the git-daemon (see "Migrating Subversion repositories to Git" for information on how I set up these repositories).

Now git push will work.