Working with others

So far, we've outlined how to manage our Git repository when developing by ourselves; however, more often than not, you'll work as part of a team. In those instances, your team must work in a way that allows your colleagues to get the updates you have done, as well as update others on their own changes.

Fortunately, Git is a distributed VCS, which means any local repository can act as the remote repository for someone else. This means your colleagues can pull your changes onto their machine, and you can pull their changes onto yours:

 

However, this would mean you'd have to pull from everybody's machine regularly to get all the latest changes. Furthermore, where there are merge conflicts, one person might resolve them differently to another.

So while it is technically possible to follow this distributed workflow, most teams elect a single repository that they consider to be the central one.

By convention, this remote repository is called origin:

When you want to update your local repository with changes made by your colleagues, you pull from the origin repository. When you have changes that you think are ready to be incorporated, you push them into origin.