error: pathspec 'test-branch' did not match any file(s) known to git

Question

I am a new user of Git. I have forked a repository called Spoon-Knife (available for practicing forking with Git). Then, I cloned it locally by running

git clone https://github.com/rohinichoudhary/Spoon-Knife.git 

This repository contains three branches, i.e.

• master,
• test-branch,
• change-the-title.

When I run git branch, it only shows *master, not the remaining two branches. And when I run

git checkout test-branch 

I get the following error:

error: pathspec 'test-branch' did not match any file(s) known to git.

Why is this happening? How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

The modern Git should able to detect remote branches and create a local one on checkout.

However if you did a shallow clone (e.g. with --depth 1), try the following commands to correct it:

git config remote.origin.fetch '+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*' git fetch --all 

and try to checkout out the branch again.

Alternatively try to unshallow your clone, e.g. git fetch --unshallow and try again.

^{See also: How to fetch all remote branches?}

Answer 2

When I run git branch, it only shows *master, not the remaining two branches.

git branch doesn't list test_branch, because no such local branch exist in your local repo, yet. When cloning a repo, only one local branch (master, here) is created and checked out in the resulting clone, irrespective of the number of branches that exist in the remote repo that you cloned from. At this stage, test_branch only exist in your repo as a remote-tracking branch, not as a local branch.

And when I run

git checkout test-branch 

I get the following error [...]

You must be using an "old" version of Git. In more recent versions (from v1.7.0-rc0 onwards),

If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name, treat [git checkout <branch>] as equivalent to

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

Simply run

git checkout -b test_branch --track origin/test_branch 

instead. Or update to a more recent version of Git.