I’m still learning my way around all the finer points of git. One thing that confused me for a while was why cloned repositories seemed to act differently than repositories I manually added the remote origin to. Specifically, on a cloned repo, git status would tell me how many commits I was ahead of the remote master branch, and I could do things like git pull instead of git pull origin master.

As I learned more, I realized the default master branch was set up as a remote tracking branch by default only if the repo was cloned. So on a repo that wasn’t cloned, I figured I’d set up master as a remote tracking branch just like any other:

git branch --track master origin/master

Of course, this fails because the master branch already exists. The solution was to manually edit .git/config and add this:

[branch "master"]
	remote = origin
	merge = refs/heads/master

Bingo. Now I could recklessly git pull and push without specifying the branches, and status lets me know when I’m ahead of origin.

Update: As suggested by Chris Saylor in the comments, you can add the above to your git config via the command line with:

git config branch.master.remote origin
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master