How do I check out a remote Git branch?

Question

Somebody pushed a branch called test with git push origin test to a shared repository. I can see the branch with git branch -r.

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Answer 1

For us, it seems the remote.origin.fetch configuration gave a problem. Therefore, we could not see any other remote branches than master, so git fetch [--all] did not help. Neither git checkout mybranch nor git checkout -b mybranch --track origin/mybranch did work, although it certainly was at remote.

The previous configuration only allowed master to be fetched:

$ git config --list | grep fetch
remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

Fix it by using * and fetch the new information from origin:

$ git config remote.origin.fetch '+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*'

$ git fetch
...
 * [new branch] ...
...

Now we could git checkout the remote branch locally.

No idea how this config ended up in our local repo.