3.5 Git Branching - Remote Branches

When you want to share a branch with the world, you need to push it up to a remote that you have write access to. Your local branches aren’t automatically synchronized to the remotes you write to — you have to explicitly push the branches you want to share. That way, you can use private branches for work you don’t want to share, and push up only the topic branches you want to collaborate on.

If you have a branch named serverfix that you want to work on with others, you can push it up the same way you pushed your first branch. Run git push <remote> <branch>:

This is a bit of a shortcut. Git automatically expands the serverfix branchname out to refs/heads/serverfix:refs/heads/serverfix, which means, “Take my serverfix local branch and push it to update the remote’s serverfix branch.” We’ll go over the refs/heads/ part in detail in Git Internals, but you can generally leave it off. You can also do git push origin serverfix:serverfix, which does the same thing — it says, “Take my serverfix and make it the remote’s serverfix.” You can use this format to push a local branch into a remote branch that is named differently. If you didn’t want it to be called serverfix on the remote, you could instead run git push origin serverfix:awesomebranch to push your local serverfix branch to the awesomebranch branch on the remote project.

The next time one of your collaborators fetches from the server, they will get a reference to where the server’s version of serverfix is under the remote branch origin/serverfix:

It’s important to note that when you do a fetch that brings down new remote-tracking branches, you don’t automatically have local, editable copies of them. In other words, in this case, you don’t have a new serverfix branch — you only have an origin/serverfix pointer that you can’t modify.

To merge this work into your current working branch, you can run git merge origin/serverfix. If you want your own serverfix branch that you can work on, you can base it off your remote-tracking branch:

This gives you a local branch that you can work on that starts where origin/serverfix is.

Checking out a local branch from a remote-tracking branch automatically creates what is called a “tracking branch” (and the branch it tracks is called an “upstream branch”). Tracking branches are local branches that have a direct relationship to a remote branch. If you’re on a tracking branch and type git pull, Git automatically knows which server to fetch from and which branch to merge in.

When you clone a repository, it generally automatically creates a master branch that tracks origin/master. However, you can set up other tracking branches if you wish — ones that track branches on other remotes, or don’t track the master branch. The simple case is the example you just saw, running git checkout -b <branch> <remote>/<branch>. This is a common enough operation that Git provides the --track shorthand:

In fact, this is so common that there’s even a shortcut for that shortcut. If the branch name you’re trying to checkout (a) doesn’t exist and (b) exactly matches a name on only one remote, Git will create a tracking branch for you:

To set up a local branch with a different name than the remote branch, you can easily use the first version with a different local branch name:

Now, your local branch sf will automatically pull from origin/serverfix.

If you already have a local branch and want to set it to a remote branch you just pulled down, or want to change the upstream branch you’re tracking, you can use the -u or --set-upstream-to option to git branch to explicitly set it at any time.

If you want to see what tracking branches you have set up, you can use the -vv option to git branch. This will list out your local branches with more information including what each branch is tracking and if your local branch is ahead, behind or both.

So here we can see that our iss53 branch is tracking origin/iss53 and is “ahead” by two, meaning that we have two commits locally that are not pushed to the server. We can also see that our master branch is tracking origin/master and is up to date. Next we can see that our serverfix branch is tracking the server-fix-good branch on our teamone server and is ahead by three and behind by one, meaning that there is one commit on the server we haven’t merged in yet and three commits locally that we haven’t pushed. Finally we can see that our testing branch is not tracking any remote branch.

It’s important to note that these numbers are only since the last time you fetched from each server. This command does not reach out to the servers, it’s telling you about what it has cached from these servers locally. If you want totally up to date ahead and behind numbers, you’ll need to fetch from all your remotes right before running this. You could do that like this:

While the git fetch command will fetch down all the changes on the server that you don’t have yet, it will not modify your working directory at all. It will simply get the data for you and let you merge it yourself. However, there is a command called git pull which is essentially a git fetch immediately followed by a git merge in most cases. If you have a tracking branch set up as demonstrated in the last section, either by explicitly setting it or by having it created for you by the clone or checkout commands, git pull will look up what server and branch your current branch is tracking, fetch from that server and then try to merge in that remote branch.

Generally it’s better to simply use the fetch and merge commands explicitly as the magic of git pull can often be confusing.

Suppose you’re done with a remote branch – say you and your collaborators are finished with a feature and have merged it into your remote’s master branch (or whatever branch your stable codeline is in). You can delete a remote branch using the --delete option to git push. If you want to delete your serverfix branch from the server, you run the following:

Basically all this does is remove the pointer from the server. The Git server will generally keep the data there for a while until a garbage collection runs, so if it was accidentally deleted, it’s often easy to recover.