I’m going to talk about changing SourceTree’s default remote.

When you’re pushing a new branch, SourceTree will automatically guess which remote you wish to push to by default.

SourceTree defaults to origin

By default SourceTree will always pick origin to push a new branch to. Depending on your workflow, you may want to set another remote as your default, let’s say my-fork for instance.

Renaming a remote

Interestingly all we have to do is rename our remotes. Since SourceTree always picks origin we just need to rename to anything else. Perhaps to the name of owner of the repo like SproutSocial or FaceBook. It’s safe to rename the remotes, it’s just a nickname only used locally.

(I’ve never been a fan of “origin“, it’s terribly confusing and ambiguous for those learning git).

Steps to rename the remote

via git

git remote rename origin SproutSocial

In SourceTree

• Open the repo settings (gear in top right)
• Remotes tab
• Click on the remote
• Edit
• Change the Remote Name

Changing SourceTree’s Default Remote

Once we’ve renamed origin, SourceTree will always pick the remote that comes first alphabetically. So, do the ‘ol classic prefixed by numbers. Here I’ll name them 01-my-fork and 02-origin.

Boom! SourceTree picks 01-my-fork by default!

Simple workflow optimizations like this, make me happy.