Why does git status show branch is up-to-date when changes exist upstream

Question

Changes exist upstream in a tracked branch  but when I type git status it indicates that my local branch is up-to-date   Is this new behavior  did I change a config setting  or is something wrong   Thanks for the help   ubuntu host  my repo  git status On branch master Your branch is up-to-date with  origin master    nothing to commit  working directory clean   ubuntu host  my repo  git pull remote  Counting objects  11  done  remote  Compressing objects  100   11 11   done  remote  Total 11  delta 6   reused 0  delta 0  Unpacking objects  100   11 11   done  From bitbucket org my repo    1234567  abcdefg  master     - gt  origin master Updating 1234567  abcdefg Fast-forward  file1           1 -  file2          43                                              file3          21             ---------  file4          21             ---------  4 files changed  67 insertions     19 deletions -   create mode 100644 file5

User · Answer

origin master  refers to the reference poiting to the HEAD commit of branch  origin master   A reference is a human-friendly alias name to a Git object  typically a commit object   origin master  reference only gets updated when you git push to your remote  http   git-scm com book en v2 Git-Internals-Git-References Remotes    From within the root of your project  run   cat  git refs remotes origin master  Compare the displayed commit ID with   cat  git refs heads master  They should be the same  and that s why Git says master is up-to-date with origin master   When you run  git fetch origin master  That retrieves new Git objects locally under  git objects folder  And Git updates  git FETCH HEAD so that now  it points to the latest commit of the fetched branch   So to see the differences between your current local branch  and the branch fetched from upstream  you can run  git diff HEAD FETCH HEAD

User · Answer

Trivial answer yet accurate in some cases  such as the one that brought me here  I was working in a repo which was new for me and I added a file which was not seen as new by the status   It ends up that the file matched a pattern in the  gitignore file

User · Answer

While these are all viable answers  I decided to give my way of checking if local repo is in line with the remote  whithout fetching or pulling  In order to see where my branches are I use simply    git remote show origin   What it does is return all the current tracked branches and most importantly - the info whether they are up to date  ahead or behind the remote origin ones  After the above command  this is an example of what is returned       remote origin   Fetch URL  https   github com xxxx xxxx git   Push  URL  https   github com xxxx xxxx git   HEAD branch  master   Remote branches      master      tracked     no-payments tracked   Local branches configured for  git pull       master      merges with remote master     no-payments merges with remote no-payments   Local refs configured for  git push       master      pushes to master       local out of date      no-payments pushes to no-payments  local out of date    Hope this helps someone

User · Answer

Let look into a sample git repo to verify if your branch  master  is up to date with origin master   Verify that local master is tracking origin master     git branch -vv   master a357df1eb  origin master  This is a commit message   More info about local master branch      git show --summary commit a357df1eb941beb5cac3601153f063dae7faf5a8  HEAD - gt  master  tag  2 8 0  origin master  origin HEAD  Author      Date    Tue Dec 11 14 25 52 2018  0100      Another commit message   Verify if origin master is on the same commit     cat  git packed-refs   grep origin master a357df1eb941beb5cac3601153f063dae7faf5a8 refs remotes origin master   We can see the same hash around  and safe to say the branch is in consistency with the remote one  at least in the current git repo

User · Answer

I have faced a similar problem  I searched everywhere online for solutions and I tried to follow them  None worked for me  These were the steps I took to the problem  Make new repo and push the existing code again to the new repo git init doesn   t initialize if you already have a  git  folder in your repository  So  for your case  do -  1  rm -rf  git   2  git init  3  git remote add origin https   repository remote url  4  git commit -m    Commit message     5  git push -f origin master Note that all git configs like remote repositories for this repository are cleared in step 1  So  you have to set up all remote repository URLs again  Also  take care of the -f in step 5  The remote already has some code base with n commits  and you   re trying to make all those changes into a single commit  So  force-pushing the changes to remote is necessary

User · Answer

What the status is telling you is that you re behind the ref called origin master which is a local ref in your local repo  In this case that ref happens to track a branch in some remote  called origin  but the status is not telling you anything about the branch on the remote  It s telling you about the ref  which is just a commit ID stored on your local filesystem  in this case  it s typically in a file called  git refs remotes origin master in your local repo    git pull does two operations  first it does a git fetch to get up to date with the commits in the remote repo  which updates the origin master ref in your local repo   then it does a git merge to merge those commits into the current branch   Until you do the fetch step  either on its own or via git pull  your local repo has no way to know that there are additional commits upstream  and git status only looks at your local origin master ref   When git status says up-to-date  it means  up-to-date with the branch that the current branch tracks   which in this case means  up-to-date with the local ref called origin master   That only equates to  up-to-date with the upstream status that was retrieved last time we did a fetch  which is not the same as  up-to-date with the latest live status of the upstream    Why does it work this way  Well the fetch step is a potentially slow and expensive network operation  The design of Git  and other distributed version control systems  is to avoid network operations when unnecessary  and is a completely different model to the typical client-server system many people are used to  although as pointed out in the comments below  Git s concept of a  remote tracking branch  that causes confusion here is not shared by all DVCSs   It s entirely possible to use Git offline  with no connection to a centralized server  and the output of git status reflects this   Creating and switching branches  and checking their status  in Git is supposed to be lightweight  not something that performs a slow network operation to a centralized system  The assumption when designing Git  and the git status output  was that users understand this  too many Git features only make sense if you already know how Git works   With the adoption of Git by lots and lots of users who are not familiar with DVCS this assumption is not always valid

User · Answer

This is because your local repo hasn t checked in with the upstream remotes  To have this work as you re expecting it to  use git fetch then run a git status again

User · Answer

in this case use git add and integrate all pending files and then use git commit and then git push  git add - integrate all pedent files  git commit - save the commit  git push -  save to repository

[git] Why does git status show branch is up-to-date when changes exist upstream?

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