Not able to pull the code through git pull

Question

I have two below branches in my remote GitHub repository:

master
test-branch

I did git pull in my test directory but I don't see any code pull in my local directory. Also when I do git branch I don't see any local branch listing here. Not sure why? But once I do git branch -a , see below remote branches displayed in red:

 remotes/origin/master
 remotes/origin/test-branch

When I do specific branch pull ie git pull origin test-branch I see code gets pulled in my test directory but when I do git branch I see below listing:

* master
  remotes/origin/test-branch [displayed in red]

Not sure why it is displaying master here as I pulled test-branch code. Also how I can see which remote branch this master is pointing to?

Answer 1

When you do git pull origin test-branch it will actually pull the changes from origin remote master branch and merge them into the currently checked out branch.

Checkout remote branch locally and setup tracking

git fetch
git checkout --track origin/test-branch

This will basically do the following:

1. git fetch will update to remote
2. Create a local branch called test-branch
3. Setup origin/test-branch as remote tracking branch
4. Set local branch to origin/test-branch

From the git manual:

-t, --track
When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration. See "--track" in git-branch(1) for details.

If no -b option is given, the name of the new branch will be derived from the remote-tracking branch, by looking at the local part of the refspec configured for the corresponding remote, and then stripping the
initial part up to the "*". This would tell us to use hack as the local branch when branching off of origin/hack (or remotes/origin/hack, or even refs/remotes/origin/hack). If the given name has no slash, or the
above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted. You can explicitly give a name with -b in such a case.

So this basically means that if your remote branch is called origin/test-branch it will call your locally created branch test-branch .

To show which branches are tracked

git status

will show you in the second line what remote it's tracking if it's tracking

git branch -vv

will show you a list of local branches and which remote they're tracking

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Checkout this stackoverflow answer for a more detailed answer.

Answer 2

By default, git pull origin xyz runs git fetch origin xyz followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD . It is important to note that the specified remote branch is not checked out but integrated into the local branch.

It displays * master because you actually did not switch to a different branch by running git pull origin xyz . However, the changes of the branch xyz were integrated into your local master branch since a merge was performed after fetching. Probably you want to first switch to the desired branch ( git checkout xyz ) and then pull the changes ( git pull ).

You can use git branch -a -vv to show remote and local branches including tracking information as well as the currently checked-out branch:

* xyz                   b7b2f7c [origin/xyz] Commit Message A
  main                  8c4124b [origin/main] Commit Message B
  remotes/origin/HEAD   -> origin/main
  remotes/origin/xyz    b7b2f7c Commit Message A
  remotes/origin/main   8c4124b Commit Message B