How to clone all remote branches in Git?

Question

I have a master and a development branch, both pushed to GitHub. I\'ve cloned, pulled, and fetched, but I re

Answer 1

Looking at one of answers to the question I noticed that it's possible to shorten it:

for branch in  `git branch -r | grep -v 'HEAD\|master'`; do  
 git branch --track ${branch##*/} $branch;
done

But beware, if one of remote branches is named as e.g. admin_master it won't get downloaded!

Thanks to bigfish for original idea

Answer 2

Use my tool git_remote_branch (you need Ruby installed on your machine). It's built specifically to make remote branch manipulations dead easy.

Each time it does an operation on your behalf, it prints it in red at the console. Over time, they finally stick into your brain :-)

If you don't want grb to run commands on your behalf, just use the 'explain' feature. The commands will be printed to your console instead of executed for you.

Finally, all commands have aliases, to make memorization easier.

Note that this is alpha software ;-)

Here's the help when you run grb help:

git_remote_branch version 0.2.6

  Usage:

  grb create branch_name [origin_server] 

  grb publish branch_name [origin_server] 

  grb rename branch_name [origin_server] 

  grb delete branch_name [origin_server] 

  grb track branch_name [origin_server] 



  Notes:
  - If origin_server is not specified, the name 'origin' is assumed 
    (git's default)
  - The rename functionality renames the current branch

  The explain meta-command: you can also prepend any command with the 
keyword 'explain'. Instead of executing the command, git_remote_branch 
will simply output the list of commands you need to run to accomplish 
that goal.

  Example: 
    grb explain create
    grb explain create my_branch github

  All commands also have aliases:
  create: create, new
  delete: delete, destroy, kill, remove, rm
  publish: publish, remotize
  rename: rename, rn, mv, move
  track: track, follow, grab, fetch

Answer 3

Using the --mirror option seems to copy the remote tracking branches properly. However, it sets up the repository as a bare repository, so you have to turn it back into a normal repository afterwards.

git clone --mirror path/to/original path/to/dest/.git
cd path/to/dest
git config --bool core.bare false
git checkout anybranch

^{Reference: Git FAQ: How do I clone a repository with all remotely tracked branches?}

Answer 4

This Bash script helped me out:

#!/bin/bash
for branch in $(git branch --all | grep '^\s*remotes' | egrep --invert-match '(:?HEAD|master)$'); do
    git branch --track "${branch##*/}" "$branch"
done

It will create tracking branches for all remote branches, except master (which you probably got from the original clone command). I think you might still need to do a

git fetch --all
git pull --all

to be sure.

One liner: git branch -a | grep -v HEAD | perl -ne 'chomp($_); s|^\*?\s*||; if (m|(.+)/(.+)| && not $d{$2}) {print qq(git branch --track $2 $1/$2\n)} else {$d{$_}=1}' | csh -xfs
As usual: test in your setup before copying rm -rf universe as we know it

Credits for one-liner go to user cfi

Answer 5

When you do "git clone git://location", all branches and tags are fetched.

In order to work on top of a specific remote branch, assuming it's the origin remote:

git checkout -b branch origin/branchname

Answer 6

Regarding,

$ git checkout -b experimental origin/experimental

using

$ git checkout -t origin/experimental

or the more verbose but easier to remember

$ git checkout --track origin/experimental

might be better, in terms of tracking a remote repository.