You created a local repo in your m/c and then want to push it to github The github repo for your project has already been created on github. Either you have created it or has been added as one of the collaborators. When you create a project $ rails new app1 --skip-active-record --skip-bundle and want this to be associated to the repo cd to the project folder, $ cd app1 and then execute $git init $ git remote add origin git@github.com:analytics/app1.git then do $git pull origin master $git push So, the local repo has been pushed to the remote github repo