Checkout branch on different remote

Question

I have a repo that has another remote upstream besides origin. I can do git checkout origin/master, but when I run git checkout upst

Answer 1

Just fetch the refs from the remote (this will fetch all branch, commit, refs etc for the upstream repo)

git fetch upstream

After this, checkout the needed branch (this creates a local copy of the branch)

git checkout -b <branchname> --track upstream/<branchname>

Now if you want to pull the changes in this branch in future, all you need to do is

git pull upstream <branchname>

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As mentioned here, try doing an explicit fetch on the branch name:

git fetch upstream master:branch_name

Answer 2

In more concise way (I'm using git 2.28), you can say

git fetch upstream

and then

git checkout -b <branch_name> --guess

where the --guess flag checks if a branch corresponding to <branch_name> exists on any of the remotes and tracks the corresponding remote (docs here).

Answer 3

If you just added the remote, you'll need to fetch it so that Git knows which branches are available:

git fetch upstream master

After this you can do

git checkout upstream/master

without any issues.