How do you create a remote Git branch?

First, you must create your branch locally

git checkout -b your_branch

After that, you can work locally in your branch, when you are ready to share the branch, push it. The next command push the branch to the remote repository origin and tracks it

git push -u origin your_branch

Teammates can reach your branch, by doing:

git fetch
git checkout origin/your_branch

You can continue working in the branch and pushing whenever you want without passing arguments to git push (argumentless git push will push the master to remote master, your_branch local to remote your_branch, etc...)

git push

Teammates can push to your branch by doing commits and then push explicitly

... work ...
git commit
... work ...
git commit
git push origin HEAD:refs/heads/your_branch

Or tracking the branch to avoid the arguments to git push

git checkout --track -b your_branch origin/your_branch
... work ...
git commit
... work ...
git commit
git push

As stated in the previous answers,

git push <remote-name> <local-branch-name>:<remote-branch-name>

is enough for pushing a local branch.

Your colleagues, can pull all remote branches (including new ones) with this command:

git remote update

Then, to make changes on the branch, the usual flow:

git checkout -b <local-branch-name> <remote-name>/<remote-branch-name>

As of Git 2.0 the behaviour has become simpler:

You can configure git with push.default = current to make life easier:

I added this so now I can just push a new branch upstream with

$ git push -u

-u will track remote branch of same name. No with this configuration you will auto-guess the remote reference to git push. From git.config documentation:

push.default

Defines the action git push should take if no refspec is explicitly given.

push.default = current - push the current branch to update a branch with the same name on the receiving end. Works in both central and non-central workflows.

For me, this is a good simplification of my day-to-day Git workflow. The configuration setting takes care of the 'usual' use case where you add a branch locally and want to create it remotely. Also, I can just as easily create local branches from remotes by just doing git co remote_branch_name (as opposed to using --set-upstream-to flag).

I know this question and the accepted answers are rather old, but the behaviour has changed so that now configuration options exists to make your workflow simpler.

To add to your global Git configuration, run this on the command line:

$ git config --global push.default current

Create a new branch locally based on the current branch:

git checkout -b newbranch

Commit any changes as you normally would. Then, push it upstream:

git push -u origin HEAD

This is a shortcut to push the current branch to a branch of the same name on origin and track it so that you don't need to specify origin HEAD in the future.

Now with git, you can just type, when you are in the correct branch

git push --set-upstream origin <remote-branch-name>

and git create for you the origin branch.

I know this question is well answered, but just wanted to list the steps I take to create a new branch "myNewBranch" and push to remote ("origin" in my case) and set up tracking. Consider this the "TL;DR" version :)

# create new branch and checkout that branch
git checkout -b myNewBranch
# now push branch to remote 
git push origin myNewBranch
# set up the new branch to track remote branch from origin
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/myNewBranch myNewBranch

Here is how you do it in eclipse through Egit.

1) Go the "Git Repository Exploring" view and expland the git project to which you want to create a branch. Under Brances -> Local .. select the branch for which you want to create the branch ( In my case I selected master .. you can select another other branch if you wish) .. then right click and click on Create Branch option .. and select the checkout this project option and then click the finish button.

2) Now from the project explorer select the project .. right click then Team -> Push Branch.

A new remote branch will be created. You can give the name of the branch to your colleagues so that they can pull it.

git push -u <remote-name> <branch-name> doesn't work if the newly created branch isn't spawned from the same repo, i.e. if you haven't created the new branch using git checkout -b new_branch, then this will not work.

For eg, I had cloned two different repositories locally and I had to copy repo2/branch1 to repo1/ and then push it too.

This link helped me push my local branch (cloned from another repo) to my remote repo:

Just wanted to add that while:

git checkout -b {branchName}

Creates a new branch, it also checks out that branch / makes it your current branch. If, for some reason, all you want to do is snap off a branch but not make it your current branch, then you would use the following command:

git branch {branchName}

In the first command, "checkout" makes said branch your current branch, and the "-b" means: this branch doesn't exist yet, so make it for me.

First you create the branch locally:

git checkout -b your_branch

And then to create the branch remotely:

git push --set-upstream origin your_branch

Note: This works on the latests versions of git:

$ git --version
git version 2.3.0

Cheers!