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This question seems obvious, but I can't seem to find a direct answer in my searching of stackoverflow and other corners of the internet.

I have a project I work on using R studio on a local machine. The project started by pulling from a repo on Github. I can't push to this repo, as its not mine and I don't have permission. No big deal, I'd like to create a new repository on github to save all my changes to the original repo and the current state of the project. I can't just enter:

git remote add origin https://github.com/user/new_repo.git

Because there is already a remote origin. I receive this error:

fatal: remote origin already exists.

Right. This is clear. The origin is the original github repository that I pulled this from, and also the one I am not allowed to update because its not my code. Straightforward. I want to change the origin of the repository to: https://github.com/user/new_repo.git (the new repo I just setup on github), but save all of the work history of how I have modified the project.

Apologies if this is a duplicate and I don't understand the other responses to similar questions.

colin
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2 Answers2

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This should do it.

git remote set-url origin newurl

EDIT:

When you clone with the git read-only address (mostly when you don't log in), then you don't get read+write access.

Repository needs to change the way it pushes using ssh. Follow this answer to change your repo config on your PC to ssh way.

Community
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manishrw
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  • I did this, but when I go to push I get this error: `error: The requested URL returned error: 403 Forbidden while accessing https://github.com/user/new_repo.git/info/refs` – colin Dec 11 '15 at 15:22
  • If you could change the question, to aptly describe the question, it would be helpful to others too! – manishrw Dec 11 '15 at 15:32
  • I made the changes to the config file as instructed in the other post. I now get this error when I go to push: `Permission denied (publickey). fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly` – colin Dec 11 '15 at 16:00
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I solved this problem using advice from @manishrw, and several other posts. I needed to do several things:

First, I needed to change the origin remote url in the .git/config file. This could be accomplished as detailed by @manishrw, and the actual URL filepath needed to be ssh://git@github.com/user/new_repo.git. So, from the home directory you would enter:

git remote set-url origin ssh://git@github.com/user/new_repo.git

So far so good. However, I still had problems, as I was working from a remote computer which had never been authenticated. I would get the error: 

Permission denied (publickey). fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Second, To solve this I had to setup my username and email for github on the remote machine, and then generate an SSH key. I followed instructions here, which I summarize below:

  1. Set username and email at the shell within R studio. These are your github.com username and email.

    git config --global user.name "your_username" git config --global user.email "your_email@example.com"

  2. In RStudio, go to menu Tools / Global options / Git SVN

  3. Click "Create RSA key..." and follow instructions. You can set a password here, but its not necessary.

  4. Click "view public key" and copy the key.

  5. Copy the key to your Github account setting (Edit profile / SSH keys / Add SSH key).

To check that ssh-authentication works, try to run

ssh -T git@github.com

and you should get something like

Hi your_username! You’ve successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Everything should now work awesome.

colin
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