How can I tell Git to ignore certain branches when fetching/pulling? [duplicate]

Question

Currently, when I pull, I get changes from all the branches:

$ git pull
remote: ...
Unpacking objects: ...
From ssh://github.com/...
   a69d94d..a2019da  master     -> origin/master
   b684d4a..b8819dc  develop    -> origin/develop
 + 263c644..f1c1894  gh-pages   -> origin/gh-pages  (forced update)
Updating a69d94d..a2019da

I like this behavior, but I don't need to get content from the gh-pages branch as that only contains generated content. How do I configure Git to fetch from all branches except some (gh-pages). I'd also like to avoid ever seeing gh-pages in my list of local branches.

Answer 1

You could modify your config to fetch only one branch:

[remote "origin"]
  fetch = +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

With

git config remote.origin.fetch +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

If you have more than one branch, you can add several fetch directives to fetch those (except gh-pages, the one you don't want to fetch)

See this question for an example of a multiple-branch fetch.

I understand this isn't a solution that scales well, but a fetch refspec doesn't support the normal exclusion syntax (like ^<rev>: see "Specifying ranges").

There is a way to hide a certain refspec, introduced in git 1.8.2: commit daebaa7, "upload/receive-pack: allow hiding ref hierarchies", but that is on the remote side, not one the client side.