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Git is a popular and well-known platform for developers and their development teams. It can be said that using Git is crucial as it has many unique features compared to other tools.

It is crucial for developers to understand how to handle its features, such as Git repositories and the corresponding pull and push functions.

We have faced various situations while using Git when we have to update our local branch from a remote branch so that we should be in sync with the current team work.

Remote branches in Git

Before we get into this topic, we should know a little bit about remote branches. Remote branches are branches that exist in remote repositories and can be accessed using some Git commands.

A remote tracking branch is a branch in your local repository that tracks a remote branch. This is the branch to which each team member commits work so that everyone can pull and maintain the latest local branch.

Updating feature branches in Git

Assuming our feature (local branch) is not up to date yet, now we have to fetch the changes from our master (remote) branch so that our local feature branch is updated from the latest updates.

First, we will update our master branch. To do this, we go to our local project and check out the branch we want to merge into the master branch.

We will run the following command.

$ git checkout master

We will get the remote branches by fetching the branches and their commits from the remote repository. The full form of option -p is --prune which is used to remove remote tracking references which do not exist in the remote.

Commits to master will be saved in the local branch: remotes/master/original .

$ git fetch -p origin

Now we will merge the changes we want from origin into our local branch. Our master branch will be synchronized with the remote repository without losing our local changes.

We will run the following command to merge the remote branch into local.

$ git merge origin/master

If some changes in the local master branch are not available in the remote origin/master branch, we will use here git pullin order to pull the latest changes.

git pullThe command will apply the merge and build a merge commit that incorporates these changes.

$ git pull

We will check out the branch we want to merge into.

$ git checkout <feature-branch>

We will now merge our master branch into our local feature branch so that it can be updated with the latest changes from our team.

$ git merge master

This method will only update our local feature branch. To update it on the remote branch, we will push the changes we made, and then all updated local changes will be pushed to the remote branch.

$ git push origin <feature-branch>