git pull doesn't actually restore my missing files from remote

Question

I have been working on a branch. I committed and pushed it up to the remote repository. Now some files on that branch are missing. Hopefully they are still available on the remote branch, so I tried to do git pull:

git pull origin feature/my_branch 

However, git said all is synchronized with remote:

 * branch            feature/my_branch -> FETCH_HEAD Already up-to-date. 

How can that be up to date? I cannot find my missing files locally, and my project didn't compile because of those missing files. Again, I can see those files in the commit history of the remote branch on bitbucket.

Answer 1

git pull corresponds to the sequence of a git fetch and then git merge. So if you delete the files from your local repository, doing a git pull will not restore them.

In order to restore them you need to checkout that files from the remote repository using:

git checkout <branch name> -- <path/to/file> 

<branch name> can be local or remote.

Example: Using remote repository

1. Remote upstream name: origin
2. Remote branch: feature/xpto
3. Local branch: feature/xpto
4. File missing on local branch: example.js
5. Recover the file to the local branch from remote branch: git checkout origin/feature/xpto -- example.js
6. Now you have example.js back on your local branch

Example 2: Rollback a commit

1. git log
2. Current commit hash 7bb2154cf23b68feb0a0bbbd95446f2cd8bf3a44
3. Want to rollback to this commit hash dbc04c23b2c6f2dd7bc9b5ef4aef22611a57c3ad
   • git checkout dbc04c23b2c6f2dd7bc9b5ef4aef22611a57c3ad
4. Only want to recover the file example.js from the above commit hash
   • git checkout dbc04c23b2c6f2dd7bc9b5ef4aef22611a57c3ad -- example.js