What are the differences between these commands?:
# 1
git pull
# 2
git pull origin
# 3
git pull origin master
# 4
git pull origin/master
# 5
git pull origin HEAD:master
1) git pull will merge the latest changes from the given remote into your local branch. 2) git pull will merge the latest changes from the given branch into your local branch. 3) git pull origin/ will merge the latest changes from the given branch in the origin repository into your local branch.
Remember, a pull is a fetch and a merge. git pull origin master fetches commits from the master branch of the origin remote (into the local origin/master branch), and then it merges origin/master into the branch you currently have checked out.
When comparing Git pull vs fetch, Git fetch is a safer alternative because it pulls in all the commits from your remote but doesn't make any changes to your local files. On the other hand, Git pull is faster as you're performing multiple actions in one – a better bang for your buck.
git pull
is a convenience command, which is doing different things at the same time. Basically it is just a combination of git fetch
, which connects to the remote repository and fetches new commits, and git merge
(or git rebase
) which incorporates the new commits into your local branch. Because of the two different commands involved the meaning of git pull
is not always obvious.
You can configure an upstream for a local branch. After a fresh clone you will have a local branch "master", a remote "origin" and your master branch has "origin/master" as upstream.
I assume this setup below. (You can see your upstream configuration with git branch -vv
or by looking at .git/config.)
Now for your questions:
git pull
= git fetch origin
+ git merge origin/master
(or whatever your upstream is)git pull origin
= git pull
(as long as origin is your upstream remote)git pull origin master
= git fetch origin master
+git merge FETCH_HEAD
git pull origin/master
: invalid unless you have a remote called "origin/master"git pull origin HEAD:master
: Tries to directly reset you local master to whatever HEAD points to on origin. (Don't do this.)A pull
is basically a fetch
(which gets some commits and associated objects from a remote repository into yours) and then an operation which "applies" these into your working copy. The second stage is, by default, done using a merge
but you can set the pull.rebase
variable to true
and then it will rebase instead.
There are two questions that pop up with the pull
command. The first is, what exactly gets fetched? And the second is, how does it apply these changes to my working copy? Let's start with the first. The full form of the command is
git pull [options] [repository] [<refspec>...]
The options
are flags that control behaviour (e.g. --rebase to make pull
work as a fetch
+ rebase
even if pull.rebase
is false
).
repository
is the name (or URL) of the remote to fetch from.
refspecs
are a succinct way of specifying which references on the remote you want to fetch and where do you want to put them in your current working copy.
Let's take the most explicit form first.
git pull origin branch1:branch2
This basically says, pull the changes in the reference branch1
on the remote called origin
and then merge (or rebase) them into the local branch branch2
. If I, for example, say git pull origin master:dev
, I will get a local branch called dev
which will point to the same commit as master
. The details of how to specify refspecs are here. You can use a *
to indicate multiple refspecs. For example, git pull origin refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*
will pull all the branches (stored under heads
) into the local repository and merge them into local branches with the same names.
Now, let's remove arguments one by one to discuss how the default work. First, we can remove the destination from our refspec and simply say git pull origin branch1
. This will first fetch
the remote branch branch1
into your local repository. It will be available as a temporary reference called FETCH_HEAD
. After that, it will run git merge FETCH_HEAD
which will merge this branch into your current active branch (i.e. HEAD
). This is often done when you're in a local branch and want to fetch changes from a remote into that branch.
Now, let's drop the branch1
completely and just say git pull origin
. Now, git knows where to fetch from (origin
) but doesn't know what to fetch. It has some defaults for this. The most scenario is when your config file has a branch.<name>.merge
option (this is an entry called merge
inside a section like [branch "master"]
). If so, it will use the refspecs there for the operation.
If we drop the origin
completely and simply say git pull
, it will check the config to see if there is a branch.<name>.remote
which specifies which remote to pull from. That along with the above tells you what to pull.
Your points #4 and #5 are not normal use cases. The first makes sense if you have a remote called origin/master
which is unlikely. origin/master
is usually a local reference that tracks the master
branch on the remote origin
. The second will try to fetch changes on HEAD
on the remote (the default branch which is usually master
) and then merge those into your local master
. While this might be something you want to do on a regular basis, the command is quite unconventional and not something I've seen used often.
I've skipped a few details but these should be enough to keep you safe and comfortable in your daily work. For all the gory details, you can check out the manual page for git pull
.
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