How to Push an Existing Project to GitHub

3 min readDec 5, 2022

Introduction

GitHub is a cloud-hosted Git management tool. Git is distributed version control, meaning the entire repository and history lives wherever you put it. People tend to use GitHub in their business or development workflow as a managed hosting solution for backups of their repositories. GitHub takes this even further by letting you connect with coworkers, friends, organizations, and more.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to take an existing project you are working on and push it, so it also exists on GitHub.

Prerequisites

To initialize the repo and push it to GitHub you’ll need:

Step 1 — Create a new GitHub Repo

Sign in to GitHub and create a new empty repo. You can choose to either initialize a README or not. It doesn’t really matter because we’re just going to override everything in this remote repository anyways.

Warning: Through the rest of this tutorial, we’ll assume your GitHub username is sammy and the repo you created is named my-new-project. It is important that you replace these placeholders with your actual username and repo name.

Step 2 — Initialize Git in the project folder

From your terminal, run the following commands after navigating to the folder you would like to add.

Initialize the Git Repo

Make sure you are in the root directory of the project you want to push to GitHub and run:

Note: If you already have an initialized Git repository, you can skip this command.

git init

This step creates a hidden .git directory in your project folder, which the git software recognizes and uses to store all the metadata and version history for the project.

Add the files to Git index

git add — all

The git add command is used to tell git which files to include in a commit, and the -A (or --all) argument means “include all”.

Commit Added Files

git commit -m ‘Added my project’

The git commit command creates a new commit with all files that have been “added”. The -m (or --message) sets the message that will be included alongside the commit, used for future reference to understand the commit. In this case, the message is: 'Added my project'.

Add a new remote origin

git remote add origin git@github.com:sammy/my-new-project.git

Note: Remember, you will need to replace the highlighted parts of the username and repo name with your own username and repo name.

In git, a “remote” refers to a remote version of the same repository, which is typically on a server somewhere (in this case, GitHub). “origin” is the default name git gives to a remote server (you can have multiple remotes) so git remote add origin is instructing git to add the URL of the default remote server for this repo.

Push to GitHub

git branch -M main
git push -u origin main

The -u (or --set-upstream) flag sets the remote origin as the upstream reference. This allows you to later perform git push and git pull commands without having to specify an origin since we always want GitHub in this case.

The -f (or --force) flag stands for force. This will automatically overwrite everything in the remote directory. We’re using it here to overwrite the default README that GitHub automatically initialized.

Note: If you did not include the default README when creating the project on GitHub, the -f flag isn’t really necessary.

All together

git init
git add — all
git commit -m ‘Added my project’
git remote add origin git@github.com:sammy/my-new-project.git
git branch -M main
git push -u origin main

THANK YOU