Confusing error message from git

Question

I got this message from Git:

You asked to pull from the remote 'origin', but did not specify a branch. Because this is not the default configured remote for your current branch, you must specify a branch on the command line.

Can anyone explain it? and more important how to fix it?

Answer 1

You have to tell git which branch you want to pull from the "origin" remote repos.

I guess you want the default branch (master) so git pull origin master should fix your problem.

See git help branch, git help pull and git help fetch for more informations.

Answer 2

To fix it, assuming you are on the master branch and want to pull the master branch from the origin remote, in new enough Git versions (1.8 or newer):

git branch -u origin/master master 

(Analogously for other branches and/or remotes.)

If you can combine this with a push, it’s even shorter:

git push -u origin master 

Thereafter, a plain git pull/git push will do what you expect.

---

During the Git 1.7 series, git branch didn’t have the -u switch (only git push did), and instead you had to use the much longer --set-upstream:

git branch --set-upstream master origin/master 

Note the reversal of arguments compared to -u. I fumbled this order more than once.

---

All of these, by the way, are shorthands for doing the following, which you can still do explicitly:

git config branch.master.remote origin git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master 

Before 1.7, you had to do it this way.