Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit

gistfile1.txt

I noticed that some of my Git repos give me nice status messages like "Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit" whenever I do a git status while others do not.

I think it's because some of them weren't originally clones and had their "remote" configuration set up manually, but not completely in the way that you get when you run git clone with a recent version of Git. Whatever the cause was, here's the fix.

Here's a section of the .git/config file for a clone which does display the additional status information:

[remote "origin"]
	url = git://github.com/rentzsch/mogenerator.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
	remote = origin
	merge = refs/heads/master
And here's the equivalent config for a repo which doesn't show the status information:

[remote "origin"]
	url = git://github.com/rentzsch/mogenerator.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
The fix? Add the required info using git config:

$ git config branch.master.remote origin
$ git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master