git fetch only for current branch

Question

I know that I can fetch any remote branch to any local branch, but is there also some kind of shortcut to fetch just from the tracked remote branch to the current tracking local

Answer 1

Let's assume that you have origin remote with master, develop branches. You want to sync master but not develop.

You can do the following steps:

git fetch origin
git merge origin/master

UPDATE: in case of only branch have to be fetched:

git fetch origin master
git merge FETCH_HEAD

Answer 2

Tying together a few things from the existing answers...

Get the name of the checked out branch:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

To answer your question, how do you fetch only the current branch? Here you go, as an alias called fetchthis. Use like git fetchthis.

git config --global alias.fetchthis '!bname=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD); git fetch origin $bname`

Tested in Git for Windows:

$ git --version
git version 2.25.1.windows.1

Answer 3

git fetch $(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --abbrev-ref @{upstream} | sed 's!/! !')

Answer 4

Per https://stackoverflow.com/a/12142066/25192 - you can use this to find the name of the current branch:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

...then substitute this into the fetch command as the refspec.

Answer 5

Git is a decentralized VCS. Whe you do a fetch, you're synch'ing the two repositories entirely. Branches aren't nothing but labels attached on specific commits. I guess you mean git fetch which doesn't do any merges or stuff like that to any particular branches.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-fetch.html