What `git push` does under the hood?

Question

So I have just learned that git pull does several things

fetch to update local remote mirror
merge to merge local branch with updated local remote mirror

But what about push does it do several things under the hood similar to pull ?

Amber · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-31 06:10:28Z

7

Not really.

In a very technical sense, yes, it does multiple things, but unlike pull (where you might reasonably do fetch and merge as two different actions) all of the stuff that push does is generally always done together:

Pack up the set of commits that isn't on the remote host
Send the packed commits to the remote host
Update the remote ref to point at the commit you pushed to it

Doing #3 wouldn't really make sense without also doing #1 and #2 - and doing #1 and #2 wouldn't really do anything without also doing #3.

push never merges - you either overwrite the remote ref or your push fails.

answered Oct 31, 2014 at 6:10

Amber

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2 Comments

Alex Wolf Over a year ago

It effectively does a git merge --ff-only to update the remote reference.

Amber Over a year ago

@Zeeker which isn't really a merge (just a branch --contains check).

alabamajack · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-31 06:09:48Z

0

You can reed the official documentation of git at http://git-scm.com/docs/git-push
There you can see, that

git push

does not do several things step by step

answered Oct 31, 2014 at 6:09

alabamajack

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