We have learnt how to use Git for collaborative development, how to work together on a project in a team. We got to know different collaborative workflows, different ways of setting up repositories for collaboration. Which one to use depends on circumstances: how large the team is, how diverse, and so on. This chapter focuses on repository-to-repository interaction; the interplay between branches and remote-tracking branches in those repositories is left for Chapter 6, Advanced Branching Techniques.

We have learnt how Git can help manage information about remote repositories (remotes) involved in the chosen workflow. We were shown how to store, view, and update this information. This chapter explains how one can manage triangular workflows, in which you fetch from one repository (canonical), and push to the other (public).

We have learnt how to choose a transport protocol if the remote server offers such choice, and a few tricks such as using foreign repositories as if they were native Git repositories.

Contact with remote repositories can require providing credentials, usually the username and password, to be able to, for example, push to the repository. This chapter describes how Git can help make this part easier to use thanks to credential helpers.

Publishing your changes, sending them upstream, may involve different mechanisms, depending on the workflow. This chapter describes the push, pull request and patch-based techniques.

We have learned about the chain of trust: how to verify that a release comes from the maintainer, how to sign your work so that the maintainer can verify that it comes from you, and how the Git architecture helps with this.

The two following chapters will expand the topic of collaboration: Chapter 6, Advanced Branching Techniques, will explore relations between local branches and branches in a remote repository, and how to set up branches for collaboration, while Chapter 7, Merging Changes Together, will talk about the opposite issue—how to join the results of parallel work.