Earlier this week, I pulled down a colleagues work to test it locally. Unfortunately, the steps I followed ended up merging the new feature branch into my local master - unbeknownst to me. Then, when I pushed my work up for review, suddenly, I was carrying along all of his work too (since I merged my local master in to make sure I handled conflicts).
So, if you want to run a feature branch locally, how exactly do you pull a branch from a remote repository without merging it into an existing local branch?
StackOverflow to the rescue!
Git Commands
With A Single Remote Repository
As of Git version ^1.6.6
git fetch
git checkout test
Multiple Remote Repositories / Extra Explicit Approach
git checkout -b test <name of remote>/test
or the shorthand
git checkout -t <name of remote>/test
Examples:
git checkout -b feature/123-do-something-awesome origin/feature/123-do-something-awesomegit checkout -t origin/feature/123-do-something-awesome
Manual Definitions
I often find it helpful to look up what these flags and options are doing — in this particular case, we’re taking advantage of the -b and -t flags.
Before looking this process up, I wasn’t aware that -b took an optional second parameter, <start point> which in our case is the remote/branch-name.
The -t option works similarly, but we only specify the upstream and allowing Git to derive the branch name.
If no -b option is given, the name of the new branch will be derived from the remote-tracking branch
git checkout -b|-B <new_branch> [<start point>]
Specifying -b causes a new branch to be created as if git-branch(1)
were called and then checked out. In this case you can use the
--track or --no-track options, which will be passed to git branch.
As a convenience, --track without -b implies branch creation; see
the description of --track below.
If -B is given, <new_branch> is created if it doesn't exist;
otherwise, it is reset. This is the transactional equivalent of
$ git branch -f <branch> [<start point>]
$ git checkout <branch>
that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless "git
checkout" is successful.
...
-t, --track
When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration. See
"--track" in git-branch(1) for details.
If no -b option is given, the name of the new branch will be
derived from the remote-tracking branch, by looking at the local
part of the refspec configured for the corresponding remote, and
then stripping the initial part up to the "*". This would tell us
to use "hack" as the local branch when branching off of
"origin/hack" (or "remotes/origin/hack", or even
"refs/remotes/origin/hack"). If the given name has no slash, or the
above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted.
You can explicitly give a name with -b in such a case.
Resources:git checkout - How do I check out a remote Git branch? - Stack Overflow
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