I have a master
and a development
branch, both pushed to GitHub. I\'ve clone
d, pull
ed, and fetch
ed, but I re
Cloning from a local repo will not work with git clone & git fetch: a lot of branches/tags will remain unfetched.
To get a clone with all branches and tags.
git clone --mirror git://example.com/myproject myproject-local-bare-repo.git
To get a clone with all branches and tags but also with a working copy:
git clone --mirror git://example.com/myproject myproject/.git
cd myproject
git config --unset core.bare
git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead
git checkout master
Here's an answer that uses awk. This method should suffice if used on a new repo.
git branch -r | awk -F/ '{ system("git checkout " $NF) }'
Existing branches will simply be checked out, or declared as already in it, but filters can be added to avoid the conflicts.
It can also be modified so it calls an explicit git checkout -b <branch> -t <remote>/<branch>
command.
This answer follows Nikos C.'s idea.
Alternatively we can specify the remote branch instead. This is based on murphytalk's answer.
git branch -r | awk '{ system("git checkout -t " $NF) }'
It throws fatal error messages on conflicts but I see them harmless.
Both commands can be aliased.
Using nobody's answer as reference, we can have the following commands to create the aliases:
git config --global alias.clone-branches '! git branch -r | awk -F/ "{ system(\"git checkout \" \$NF) }"'
git config --global alias.clone-branches '! git branch -r | awk "{ system(\"git checkout -t \" \$NF) }"'
Personally I'd use track-all
or track-all-branches
.
The fetch that you are doing should get all the remote branches, but it won't create local branches for them. If you use gitk, you should see the remote branches described as "remotes/origin/dev" or something similar.
To create a local branch based on a remote branch, do something like:
git checkout -b dev refs/remotes/origin/dev
Which should return something like:
Branch dev set up to track remote branch refs/remotes/origin/dev. Switched to a new branch "dev"
Now, when you are on the dev branch, "git pull" will update your local dev to the same point as the remote dev branch. Note that it will fetch all branches, but only pull the one you are on to the top of the tree.
all the answers I saw here are valid but there is a much cleaner way to clone a repository and to pull all the branches at once.
When you clone a repository all the information of the branches is actually downloaded but the branches are hidden. With the command
$ git branch -a
you can show all the branches of the repository, and with the command
$ git checkout -b branchname origin/branchname
you can then "download" them manually one at a time.
However, when you want to clone a repo with a lot of branches all the ways illustrated are above are lengthy and tedious in respect to a much cleaner and quicker way that I am going to show, though it's a bit complicated. You need three steps to accomplish this:
create a new empty folder on your machine and clone a mirror copy of the .git folder from the repository:
$ cd ~/Desktop && mkdir my_repo_folder && cd my_repo_folder
$ git clone --mirror https://github.com/planetoftheweb/responsivebootstrap.git .git
the local repository inside the folder my_repo_folder is still empty, there is just a hidden .git folder now that you can see with a "ls -alt" command from the terminal.
switch this repository from an empty (bare) repository to a regular repository by switching the boolean value "bare" of the git configurations to false:
$ git config --bool core.bare false
Grab everything that inside the current folder and create all the branches on the local machine, therefore making this a normal repo.
$ git reset --hard
So now you can just type the command "git branch" and you can see that all the branches are downloaded.
This is the quick way in which you can clone a git repository with all the branches at once, but it's not something you wanna do for every single project in this way.
Use aliases. Though there aren't any native Git one-liners, you can define your own as
git config --global alias.clone-branches '! git branch -a | sed -n "/\/HEAD /d; /\/master$/d; /remotes/p;" | xargs -L1 git checkout -t'
and then use it as
git clone-branches
First, clone a remote Git repository and cd into it:
$ git clone git://example.com/myproject
$ cd myproject
Next, look at the local branches in your repository:
$ git branch
* master
But there are other branches hiding in your repository! You can see these using the -a
flag:
$ git branch -a
* master
remotes/origin/HEAD
remotes/origin/master
remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
remotes/origin/experimental
If you just want to take a quick peek at an upstream branch, you can check it out directly:
$ git checkout origin/experimental
But if you want to work on that branch, you'll need to create a local tracking branch which is done automatically by:
$ git checkout experimental
and you will see
Branch experimental set up to track remote branch experimental from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'experimental'
Here, "new branch" simply means that the branch is taken from the index and created locally for you. As the previous line tells you, the branch is being set up to track the remote branch, which usually means the origin/branch_name branch.
Now, if you look at your local branches, this is what you'll see:
$ git branch
* experimental
master
You can actually track more than one remote repository using git remote
.
$ git remote add win32 git://example.com/users/joe/myproject-win32-port
$ git branch -a
* master
remotes/origin/HEAD
remotes/origin/master
remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
remotes/origin/experimental
remotes/win32/master
remotes/win32/new-widgets
At this point, things are getting pretty crazy, so run gitk
to see what's going on:
$ gitk --all &