How to make git repo remember all remotes?

Question

I have a git repo that is a fork of another repo. As a rule I will normally add a remote called upstream, which is the original repo I forked from.

$ git remote -v
origin [e-mail]:skela/awesomeproject.git (fetch)
origin [e-mail]:skela/awesomeproject.git (push)
upstream git://github.com/bob/awesomeproject.git (fetch)
upstream git://github.com/bob/awesomeproject.git (push)

Is there any way to have this additional remote persist across clones? Say I delete my local repository and do a:

git clone [e-mail]:skela/awesomeproject.git

And now I recheck my remotes:

$ git remote -v
origin [e-mail]:skela/awesomeproject.git (fetch)
origin [e-mail]:skela/awesomeproject.git (push)

My upstream remote has vanished!

How to I ensure that my git repo always keeps these 2 remote aliases?

Edit: Just adding the main reason why I want to do this as to shape some of the answers down an acceptable path ;)

Goal is to have a branch in my repo that tracks the upstream's master.

[remote "upstream"]
    url = git://github.com/bob/awesomeproject.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/upstream/*
[branch "father"]
    remote = upstream
    merge = refs/heads/master

In other words, the branch "father" which is in my repo tracks the remote called upstream's master branch.

It all works great once I set it up, but as soon as I clone the repo again, the "father" branch points to origin instead of the upstream.

Answer 1

Create a file .gitremotes that you populate with the content of .git/config related to remotes. Add .gitremotes to the repository. After the clone append .git/config with .gitremotes. Note: might need some hand editing if the remotes that you want to share (in .gitremotes) have a name conflict with the remote that 'git clone' creates automatically ('orgin').

To accomplish this easily you could define a bash function:

function git-clone-r ()
{
  src=$1
  tgt=$2
  git clone $src $tgt
  cat ${tgt}/.gitremotes >> ${tgt}/.git/config
}

[The above isn't all that sophisticated; but illustrates the point and works]

Answer 2

That is impossible. Git only clones the repo’s content, never it’s settings. If your want to hard-wire remotes into your repo (it stands to question whether this is a good idea), create a script repo-setup.sh in your repo root that does something like this:

git remote rm origin
git remote rm upstream
git remote add origin [e-mail]:skela/awesomeproject.git
git remote add upstream git://github.com/bob/awesomeproject.git

The run this file after you cloned the repository.

Answer 3

This is a slightly modified version of GoZoner's solution.

You need to capture the info about all the remotes from your repo's .git/config into a file that you could store outside your git repository. You also need to take care of updating this file every time you add a new remote. This can in fact be added to your git repo, so that the next clone or pull brings in this file.

Starting with git 1.7.10+, git supports including external config files.

So you can add the following lines to your repo's .git/config to include the external config file containing the remote info:

[include]
    path            = /dir1/dir2/repo-remotes.gitinfo