How can I diff between my repo and a remote repo that's not origin?

Question

From Viewing Unpushed Git Commits I know how to make diff between a repo on my own and my local commits:

git diff origin/master..HEAD

But, How can I do the same instead of origin using a path/to/github/repo.git ?

git diff https://github.com/malarres/universal.git/GPII-795..HEAD

is returning:

fatal: Invalid object name 'https'.

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

How can I do the same instead of origin using a path/to/github/repo.git ?

git diff https://github.com/malarres/universal.git/GPII-795..HEAD

That's not the way git diff works. If you want to diff between your local repo and another repo, you need to do the following:

Add the latter as a remote of the former. Note that nothing prevents you from defining multiple remotes, in addition to origin, within one repository. (You may want to choose a less generic remote name than "other", though.)
```
 git remote add other https://github.com/malarres/universal.git/GPII-795
```
Fetch everything from that remote:
```
 git fetch other
```
Run the appropriate git diff command, for instance,
```
 git diff other/master..HEAD
```

If you later want to remove that remote from your repository, you can run

git remote rm other

1 Answers1