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When we collaborate with colleagues or even when we use any open source library, we often need to fetch branches from remote branches to get the updated work with the help of Git.

The basic process of fetching a branch is pretty straightforward. However, like other Git operations, it can become difficult when other restrictions apply, and we need to start using one of the many other options available.

This article will focus on the commands and common options you need to run to get remote branches.

Get remote branch in Git

The below mentioned command is used to fetch the remote branch in the local environment:

$ git fetch <remote-repo> <remote-branch>:<local-branch>
$ git checkout <local-branch>

fetchThe command will restore the remote branch we want with all the objects and references. It will be stored <local-branch>in the new local branch we specify with as the name.

Once we have downloaded everything from the remote repository, we can check it out to see and use the code.

If we only have one remote repository, we can use git fetchthe exclude all parameter, which will revert all branches and promote files.

Then, run git checkout <branch-name>, and we know that all remote branches are already on our system.

As mentioned above, the example command will revert all the code in the branch we are interested in, but it will not harm any local branches because we know there is nothing to merge with the fetch command.

--trackUse the option switch in Git

We often want new local repositories to follow the remote repository, which is great for easily 拉making 推送changes to individual repositories.

To do this, we use --trackthe -checkout option with checkoutthe command, which will check out the branch and track it with the remote branch at the same time. Here is the command that describes this:

$ git checkout --track <remote-branch>

This command will create a local branch with the same name as the remote branch. But if we want to checkout the remote branch to a local branch with a unique name, then we have to execute it with -bthe -l option to create a new local branch, as shown below:

$ git checkout --track -b <local-branch> <remote-branch>