How to push local changes to a remote Git repository on Bitbucket

I'm testing out Git and Bitbucket.

I've created a repository on Bitbucket and have created a local copy of the repository and I am committing files into it. I can't seem to push the files from my local repository to the remote repository.

Here's what I'm doing:

git clone https://[email protected]/me/test.git
cd test
touch dummy
git add dummy
git commit dummy -m "my first git commit"
git push

The final line outputs:

Everything up-to-date

And when I log on to Bitbucket I can’t see my dummy file.

What am I doing wrong?

Doing this worked:

 git push origin master:master

What is the explanation as to the difference between this and a simple git push?

Use git push origin master instead.

You have a repository locally and the initial git push is "pushing" to it. It's not necessary to do so (as it is local) and it shows everything as up-to-date. git push origin master specifies a a remote repository (origin) and the branch located there (master).

For more information, check out this resource.

This is a safety measure to avoid pushing branches that are not ready to be published. Loosely speaking, by executing "git push", only local branches that already exist on the server with the same name will be pushed, or branches that have been pushed using the localbranch:remotebranch syntax.

To push all local branches to the remote repository, use --all:

git push REMOTENAME --all
git push --all

or specify all branches you want to push:

git push REMOTENAME master exp-branch-a anotherbranch bugfix

In addition, it's useful to add -u to the "git push" command, as this will tell you if your local branch is ahead or behind the remote branch. This is shown when you run "git status" after a git fetch.

I'm with Git downloaded from https://git-scm.com/ and set up ssh follow to the answer for instructions https://stackoverflow.com/a/26130250/4058484.

Once the generated public key is verified in my Bitbucket account, and by referring to the steps as explaned on http://www.bohyunkim.net/blog/archives/2518 I found that just 'git push' is working:

git clone https://[email protected]/me/test.git
cd test
cp -R ../dummy/* .
git add .
git pull origin master 
git commit . -m "my first git commit" 
git config --global push.default simple
git push

Shell respond are as below:

$ git push
Counting objects: 39, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (39/39), done.
Writing objects: 100% (39/39), 2.23 MiB | 5.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 39 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://[email protected]/me/test.git 992b294..93835ca  master -> master

It even works for to push on merging master to gh-pages in GitHub

git checkout gh-pages
git merge master
git push

The meaning of the second parameter ('master') of the "git push" command -

git push origin master

can be made clear by initiating "push" command from the 'news-item' branch. It caused local the "master" branch to be pushed to the remote 'master' branch. For more information, refer to git-push.

Where <refspec> in

[<repository> [<refspec>…​]

is written to mean "specify what destination ref to update with what source object."

For your reference, here is a screen capture how I verified this statement.