I have a project with multiple branches. I've been pushing them to GitHub, and now that someone else is working on the project I need to pull their branches from GitHub. It works fine in master. But say that someone created a branch xyz. How can I pull branch xyz from GitHub and merge it into branch xyz on my localhost?
I actually have my answer here: Push and pull branches in Git
But I get an error "! [rejected]" and something about "non fast forward".
Any suggestions?
But I get an error "! [rejected]" and something about "non fast forward"
That's because Git can't merge the changes from the branches into your current master. Let's say you've checked out branch master, and you want to merge in the remote branch other-branch. When you do this:
$ git pull origin other-branch
Git is basically doing this:
$ git fetch origin other-branch && git merge other-branch
That is, a pull is just a fetch followed by a merge. However, when pull-ing, Git will only merge other-branch if it can perform a fast-forward merge. A fast-forward merge is a merge in which the head of the branch you are trying to merge into is a direct descendent of the head of the branch you want to merge. For example, if you have this history tree, then merging other-branch would result in a fast-forward merge:
O-O-O-O-O-O
^ ^
master other-branch
However, this would not be a fast-forward merge:
v master
O-O-O
\
\-O-O-O-O
^ other-branch
To solve your problem, first fetch the remote branch:
$ git fetch origin other-branch
Then merge it into your current branch (I'll assume that's master), and fix any merge conflicts:
$ git merge origin/other-branch
# Fix merge conflicts, if they occur
# Add merge conflict fixes
$ git commit # And commit the merge!
Simply track your remote branches explicitly and a simple git pull will do just what you want:
git branch -f remote_branch_name origin/remote_branch_name
git checkout remote_branch_name
The latter is a local operation.
Or even more fitting in with the GitHub documentation on forking:
git branch -f new_local_branch_name upstream/remote_branch_name
You could pull a branch to a branch with the following commands.
git pull {repo} {remotebranchname}:{localbranchname}
git pull origin xyz:xyz
When you are on the master branch you also could first checkout a branch like:
git checkout -b xyz
This creates a new branch, "xyz", from the master and directly checks it out.
Then you do:
git pull origin xyz
This pulls the new branch to your local xyz branch.
git fetch will grab the latest list of branches.
Now you can git checkout MyNewBranch
Done :)
For more info see docs: git fetch
I did
git branch -f new_local_branch_name origin/remote_branch_name
Instead of
git branch -f new_local_branch_name upstream/remote_branch_name
As suggested by @innaM.
When I used the upstream version, it said 'fatal: Not a valid object name: 'upstream/remote_branch_name''. I did not do git fetch origin as a comment suggested, but instead simply replaced upstream with origin. I guess they are equivalent.
git pull <gitreponame> <branchname>
Usually if you have only repo assigned to your code then the gitreponame would be origin.
If you are working on two repo's like one is local and another one for remote like you can check repo's list from git remote -v. this shows how many repo's are assigned to your current code.
BranchName should exists into corresponding gitreponame.
you can use following two commands to add or remove repo's
git remote add <gitreponame> <repourl>
git remote remove <gitreponame>
you may also do
git pull -r origin master
fix merge conflicts if any
git rebase --continue
-r is for rebase. This will make you branch structure from
v master
o-o-o-o-o
\o-o-o
^ other branch
to
v master
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
^ other branch
This will lead to a cleaner history. Note: In case you have already pushed your other-branch to origin( or any other remote), you may have to force push your branch after rebase.
git push -f origin other-branch
git fetch origin --force", but please read documentation before doing it. – Jakub Narębski