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
.
This question is related to
git
git remote update && 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
withgit remote update
you can see which branches got updated, so you don't really need any further commands.
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
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 && git status
to work, you need to specify the tracking information between the local branch and origin:
# git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<branch> <branch>
For the master branch:
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/master master
A good way to have a synthetic view of what's going on "origin" is:
git remote show origin
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 :)
My regular question is rather "anything new or changed in repo" so whatchanged comes handy. Found it here.
git whatchanged origin/master -n 1
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
Source: Stackoverflow.com