How to check for changes on remote origin Git repository

Question

What are the Git commands to do the following workflow  Scenario I cloned from a repository and did some commits of my own to my local repository  In the meantime  my colleagues made commits to the remote repository  Now  I want to   Check whether there are any new commits from other people on the remote repository  i e  origin   Say there were three new commits on the remote repository since my last pull  I would like to diff the remote repository s commits  i e  HEAD 3 with HEAD 2  HEAD 2 with HEAD 1 and HEAD 1 with HEAD   After knowing what changed remotely  I want to get the latest commits from the others    My findings so far For step 2  I know the caret notation HEAD   HEAD   etc  and the tilde notation HEAD 2  HEAD 3  etc  For step 3  That is  I guess  just a git pull

User · Accepted Answer

You could git fetch origin to update the remote branch in your repository to point to the latest version  For a diff against the remote   git diff origin master   Yes  you can use caret notation as well   If you want to accept the remote changes   git merge origin master

User · Answer

I simply use git fetch origin  to fetch the remote changes  and then I view both local and pending remote commits  and their associated changes  with the nice gitk tool involving the --all argument like  gitk --all

User · Answer

A good way to have a synthetic view of what s going on  origin  is   git remote show origin

User · Answer

I just use git remote update git status  The latter then reports how many commits behind my local is  if any   Then git pull origin master  to bring my local up to date

User · Answer

git remote update  amp  amp  git status    Found this on the answer to Check if pull needed in Git      git remote update to bring your remote refs up to date  Then you can   do one of several things  such as          git status -uno will tell you whether the branch you are tracking is ahead  behind or has diverged  If it says nothing  the local and   remote are the same    git show-branch  master will show you the commits in all of the branches whose names end in master  eg master and origin master           If you use -v with git remote update you can see which branches   got updated  so you don t really need any further commands

User · Answer

My regular question is rather  anything new or changed in repo  so whatchanged comes handy  Found it here   git whatchanged origin master -n 1

User · Answer

One potential solution  Thanks to Alan Haggai Alavi s solution I came up with the following potential workflow   Step 1   git fetch origin   Step 2   git checkout -b localTempOfOriginMaster origin master git difftool HEAD 3 HEAD 2 git difftool HEAD 2 HEAD 1 git difftool HEAD 1 HEAD 0   Step 3   git checkout master git branch -D localTempOfOriginMaster git merge origin master

User · Answer

git status does not always show the difference between master and origin master even after a fetch  If you want the combination git fetch origin  amp  amp  git status to work  you need to specify the tracking information between the local branch and origin    git branch --set-upstream-to origin  lt branch gt   lt branch gt   For the master branch  git branch --set-upstream-to origin master master

[git] How to check for changes on remote (origin) Git repository

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