How to do a "git checkout -b <branchname>" from a remote tag

Question

I'm trying to create a branch from a remote tag, but it seems there's no way to do it. When I try

git checkout -b test origin/deploy 

where origin is the remote and deploy is the tag I want to check out, but I get

fatal: git checkout: updating paths is incompatible with switching branches. Did you intend to checkout 'origin/deploy' which can not be resolved as commit? 

UPDATE: I've just discovered that

git fetch --all -t 

was not working properly for me. While it downloads all branches, it does not download all tags, so when I checked out deploy it was and old tag. Now I execute

git fetch --all && git fetch -t 

This way when I create a new branch based on a tag

git checkout -b test deploy 

the new branch is up to date with the last deploy.

Answer 1

I'm not sure you can do this directly. You're probably stuck with doing a fetch and then a checkout:

git fetch origin git checkout -b test tag-name 

By the way, I wouldn't recommend using a tag name like "deploy".