error: remote origin already exists.

You can check the remote repositories you have saved with git remote -v. If the origin remote you're trying to add already exists, then you don't need to add it anymore.

If the current origin remote isn't what you want and you would prefer a new one, then you can remove the existing one and add the new one with the following commands:

git remote remove origin
git remote add origin [new-url]

Or instead of removing and adding, you can "update" with set-url:

git remote set-url origin [new-url]

In git, you cannot have two remotes with the same name. You can have multiple remotes with the same url, but you cannot have more than one remote with the same name.

The remote command allows you to manage the remote repositories saved in your repository. For example, you can add a new remote repository like this:

git remote add [name] [url]

Here, you're adding a new remote repository with a "name" and the value as the "url". So you can add an "origin" repository like this:

git remote add origin https://...

Now when you do something like git push origin main, git knows that you're referring to "the main branch of the origin remote".

And you can add more remote repositories:

git remote add javascript https://...

Now when you do git fetch javascript, git knows what git url to fetch from.

You can have the same url for multiple remotes too:

git remote add javascript url-a
git remote add python url-a

We have saved two remote repositories here with the labels javascript and python respectively, both having "url-a" as their urls.

Saving a remote repository is basically a key-value data, where the key is the label and the value is a url. The important thing to note here is that the keys have to be unique. Imagine having two javascript keys, each with different "url" values. When you do:

git fetch javascript

You will be confusing git. Should git use the first url or the second url? That doesn't make sense. So if you already have a javascript remote repository saved, and then you do:

git remote add javascript another-url

Then git is like:

error: remote javascript already exists.

This is git saying, "uhmmm, you already have a remote repository with that name; maybe consider another name, or perhaps, you don't need to do what you're doing anymore".

This problem often happens when you do a git clone url and then follow it with a git remote add origin url. If you're creating a repository with git init, you would have to manually save your origin remote repository. But when you do a git clone url, git already sets the origin remote to point to the url. You don't need to do that anymore. Attempt to do that will result in the error we have addressed in this article.