JIYIK CN >

Git is a free platform and open source distributed version control system designed to control everything from small to large projects with speed and efficiency.

A local branch is one that can be found on a local personal station. It can only be seen by the currently logged in local user, on the other hand, a remote branch is a branch that can be found at a remote location and can be accessed by various users who have permission to access it.

Sometimes, we need to know which files have changed in our local repository and compare it with the remote branch. So, in this case, we will show you the simplest way to compare local and remote branches.

Let's first assume that the following remote branch is mapped to a local branch and that we are already working on it.

git checkout -b local branch origin/Remotebranch

In this case, the branch above local branchis a local branch, while origin/Remote branchis a remote branch on the server.

Comparing two Git branches

The command git fetchwill extract all the changes from the original branch into the local branch. In addition, git diffthe command will tell us the differences between the working tree local branch and the remote branch.

The Git fetch command will tell the repository to get the required branch data from the remote branch specified in the command. Although this git fetchcommand will not affect the files in our working directory, it will not try to merge changes like git pull does. The easiest way to compare two branches is to use git diff.

git diff <local branch path> <remote branch path>

When we want to know the changes of a specific file in our local environment, we run the following command.

# git diff --name-only Remotebranch

When we want to find the difference between two specific files from local branch to remote branch, we can use the following command.

git diff local branch/README.md origin/Remotebranch/README.md

If we want to know which files have been changed between the local and remote branches and what exactly those changes are, we can use the following command.

git difbashf --name-status origin/Remotebranch

If we want to ignore some files, usually there are some files that we don't want to show in the difference between local and remote files; we can use the following command to ignore the difference in files.

git diff --ignore-submodules origin/Remotebranch