Fetch, Pull & Push¶
In order te retrieve changes made by others, and submit your own changes to the remote, you can use the git fetch, git pull and git push commands.
Fetching changes¶
The git fetch command downloads all commits, files and refs from a remote repository into your local repository. Fetched content will not be immediately merged, but will remain isolated from existing local content, which makes it safe. You can review all fetched commits before merging them with your existing work.
Example: git fetch¶
The following example only performs a git fetch. Hence, it does not automatically merge the fetched content. This needs to be done manually by merging the origin/development branch, using git merge.
After performing git fetch, the remote-tracking branches will be in sync with the remote. However, your regular branches do not yet reflect the changes, until we merge them.
# Fetch all changes across all branches from remote origin
git fetch origin
# Fetch changes from a specific branch from remote origin
git fetch origin development
# Fetch all changes across branches from across all remotes
git fetch --all
Example: git fetch with git merge¶
The following example performs a git fetch and then merges the fetched content with git merge. The changes on the remote are now fully incorporated in your local repository. Both the remote-tracking branches and the regular branches are up-to-date.
# Fetch the changes from the 'development' branch on remote 'origin',
# which are then stored in 'origin/development' locally
git fetch origin development
# Checkout local 'development' branch
git switch development
# Merge the changes from 'origin/development' into 'development'
git merge origin/development
Pulling changes¶
The git pull command is more assertive. Not only will it download (git fetch) all changes from the remote repository, it will also immediately call git merge to integrate it.
If you already have pending changes, this may cause merge conflicts, which you need to resolve, in order for the pull to go through successfully. Merge conflicts will be covered in a later section.
Example: git pull¶
# Checkout local 'development' branch
git switch development
# Fetch remote's state of current branch and merge it into local
git pull
Example: git pull using git rebase¶
For those who prefer rebasing to merging, git pull --rebase uses git rebase instead of git merge when integrating the fetched changes into the local active branch.
# Checkout local 'development' branch
git switch development
# Fetch remote's state of current branch and rebase it onto local
git pull --rebase
Pushing changes¶
The git push command submits your changes in the local repository to the remote repository. It is the exact counterpart of git fetch.