How Do I git fetch and git merge from a Remote Tracking Branch like git pull

Question

I have set up some remote tracking branches in git  but I never seem to be able to merge them into the local branch once I have updated them with  git fetch    For example  suppose I have remote branch called  an-other-branch   I set that up locally as a tracking branch using  git branch --track an-other-branch origin an-other-branch   So far  so good  But if that branch gets updated  usually by me moving machine and commiting from that machine   and I want to update it on the original machine  I m running into trouble with fetch merge   git fetch origin an-other-branch git merge origin an-other-branch   Whenever I do this  I get an  Already up-to-date  message and nothing merges   However  a  git pull origin an-other-branch   always updates it like you would expect   Also  running git diff  git diff origin an-other-branch   shows that there are differences  so I think I have my syntax wrong   What am I doing wrong   EDIT  2010-04-09   I have checked a couple of times  and I m definitely not on a different branch  Should my  git fetch  followed by a  git merge   as shown above  do the exact same thing as a git pull  I will get some workflow showing the results of a git status etc

User · Answer

Are you sure you are on the local an-other-branch when you merge   git fetch origin an-other-branch git checkout an-other-branch git merge origin an-other-branch   The other explanation      all the changes from the branch you   re trying to merge have already been merged to the branch you   re currently on    More specifically it means that the branch you   re trying to merge is a parent of your current branch      if you re ahead of the remote repo by one commit  it s the remote repo that s out of date  not you    But in your case  if git pull works  that just means you are not on the right branch

User · Answer

You don t fetch a branch  you fetch an entire remote   git fetch origin git merge origin an-other-branch

User · Answer

these are the commands   git fetch origin git merge origin somebranch somebranch   if you do this on the second line   git merge origin somebranch   it will try to merge the local master into your current branch   The question  as I ve understood it  was you fetched already locally and want to now merge your branch to the latest of the same branch

User · Answer

Selecting just one branch  fetch merge vs  pull  People often advise you to separate  fetching  from  merging   They say instead of this       git pull remoteR branchB   do this       git fetch remoteR     git merge remoteR branchB   What they don t mention is that such a fetch command will actually fetch all branches from the remote repo  which is not what that pull command does  If you have thousands of branches in the remote repo  but you do not want to see all of them  you can run this obscure command       git fetch remoteR refs heads branchB refs remotes remoteR branchB     git branch -a    to verify     git branch -t branchB remoteR branchB   Of course  that s ridiculously hard to remember  so if you really want to avoid fetching all branches  it is better to alter your  git config as described in ProGit   Huh   The best explanation of all this is in Chapter 9-5 of ProGit  Git Internals - The Refspec  or via github   That is amazingly hard to find via Google   First  we need to clear up some terminology  For remote-branch-tracking  there are typically 3 different branches to be aware of    The branch on the remote repo  refs heads branchB inside the other repo Your remote-tracking branch  refs remotes remoteR branchB in your repo Your own branch  refs heads branchB inside your repo   Remote-tracking branches  in refs remotes  are read-only  You do not modify those directly  You modify your own branch  and then you push to the corresponding branch at the remote repo  The result is not reflected in your refs remotes until after an appropriate pull or fetch  That distinction was difficult for me to understand from the git man-pages  mainly because the local branch  refs heads branchB  is said to  track  the remote-tracking branch when  git config defines branch branchB remote   remoteR   Think of  refs  as C   pointers  Physically  they are files containing SHA-digests  but basically they are just pointers into the commit tree  git fetch will add many nodes to your commit-tree  but how git decides what pointers to move is a bit complicated   As mentioned in another answer  neither      git pull remoteR branchB   nor      git fetch remoteR branchB   would move refs remotes branches branchB  and the latter certainly cannot move refs heads branchB  However  both move FETCH HEAD   You can cat any of these files inside  git  to see when they change   And git merge will refer to FETCH HEAD  while setting MERGE ORIG  etc

User · Answer

Git pull is actually a combo tool  it runs git fetch  getting the changes  and git merge  merging them with your current copy   Are you sure you are on the correct branch

[git] How Do I 'git fetch' and 'git merge' from a Remote Tracking Branch (like 'git pull')

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