Remote Branches

A remote branch is like a local branch, but it points to the commit that a branch in a remote repo is at. You can update a local branch with commits from a remote repository by merging a remote branch into a local branch.

• Normally, remote branches are used with a repo on a different machine, but they'll also work if we clone a repo to a second local directory.
• This will also let us see the effects on both sides as we push and pull commits, so let's do a local clone.
• We'll have our original repo act as the remote repo, and our clone act as the local repo.
• I'm in the original repo right now, so I'll change to the directory that contains it with cd ... Remember that the .. stands for the parent directory.
• We clone the repo with the git clone command. In place of a URL, we'll have it clone from the decoder directory. We'll set up the clone in the decoder-local directory: git clone decoder decoder-local
• Let's change into the directory for our so-called "local" repo, the clone: cd decoder-local
• As always, when you clone a repo, the original repo is set up as a remote repo named origin.
  • We can see this if we run the git remote command.
• If we run the git branch command, we'll see that Git has also set up a master branch for us.
  • That's the only branch visible for now. There's no sign of the add-letters branch from the remote repo.
• If we run git status, we'll see something new.
  • At the top, it says "On branch master", as usual.
  • But then below that, it says "Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'."

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

• origin/master is a remote branch.
  • You can tell a remote branch name when you see one, because it always has the remote repo name, a slash, and a branch name.

Let's try using the remote branch to bring a commit from the remote repo to the local repo. I'll be using the fetch and merge subcommands for this.

• Change to the original repo, with cd ../decoder/. This changes up to the parent directory, and then immediately changes into the decoder directory.
• Make sure the master branch is checked out: git checkout master
• Now let's edit the decoder.rb file, and add a new letter conversion.

  26 => 'Z'

• Now let's stage the file: git add decoder.rb
• And commit it: git commit -m 'Add Z conversion'
• Now we have a new commit on the master branch in our remote repo. Let's go to our local repo and use the remote branch to copy that commit over.
• I need to change to the clone's directory cd ../decoder-local/. Again, that will change to the parent directory, and into the decoder-local subdirectory: cd ../decoder-local
• To connect to the remote repo and update our remote branches in this local repo, we use the git fetch command. We need to give git fetch an argument with the name of the remote repo to connect to: git fetch origin

$ git fetch origin
remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From /Users/jay/th/decoder
   a305f48..93252af  master     -> origin/master

• Now, if I run git status again, you'll see that the master local branch is out of sync with the origin/master remote branch.
• This is because the origin/master branch has been updated, but the master branch hasn't.

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 1 commit, and can be fast-forwarded.
  (use "git pull" to update your local branch)

nothing to commit, working tree clean

• We can update the local master branch by merging the remote origin/master branch into it.
• To do that, we use the git merge command, just as we would with any other branch: git merge origin/master

$ git merge origin/master
Updating a305f48..93252af
Fast-forward
 decoder.rb | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)