Pulling a Remote Branch In Git

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Because I know I’ll forget it if I don’t write it down now.

I’ve been doing a thing in a branch on one machine, but now I want to do that thing on another machine. I’ve already pushed that branch to origin, so I don’t need to - hold on. I better put that down as well.

On One Machine

The main concern here is to ensure that my work isn’t stuck on the one machine. The -u flag (or --set-upstream for the verbose) creates a tracking reference upstream, so that the remote repository remembers the branch.

Terminal window
$ git branch
master
* oh-hai
$ git push -u origin oh-hai

On Another Machine

Now that I’ve created the tracking reference upstream, I can pull it down from the other machine.

Terminal window
$ git branch
* master
$ git branch -r
origin/master
origin/oh-hai
$ git checkout --track -b oh-hai origin/oh-hai

Hope I didn’t forget anything. I’ll find out soon enough.