If you've been working with git for a while you've probably realised that it has a LOT of configs. A pretty nice one is the push.default, which allows you to change the way your branches are pushed to a remote.
Here at Group Buddies we've been using the current configuration for this. The definition, straight from the official website is as follows:
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.
What this means is that when you create a local branch and then do git push, a remote branch with the same name will automatically be created for you. Pretty cool.
You can add this as global git configuration:
$ git config --global push.default currentIt does not however set the local branch to track the remote, since it is supposed to work for non-central workflows as well, but since we use a central workflow (using GitHub), we want it to be tracked. This config allows this to be done pretty easily, you just have to do git push -u the first time you push (any time really, since it is idempotent), and you're done.
Check out our dotfiles for this an some other nice configurations of git, vim and zsh.