Shortcut equivalent for a git pull from repository to current branch

Question

In git I'm using the pull command to merge from a different repository, for example:

git pull ../mortoray-main/ mortoray-main

This will fetch and merge the mortoray-main branch from the other repository into the current branch in the current repository.

What I'm looking for is how to setup the equivalent shortcut that I can just do this:

git pull mortoray

In my gitconfig I added this:

[remote "mortoray"]
    url = ../mortoray-main/
    fetch = mortoray-main

The problem is now that when I run git pull mortoray I get the error: "You asked to pull from the remote 'mortoray', but did not specify a branch. Because this is not the default configured remote for your current branch, you must specify a branch on the command line."

How does one configure the remote to get the shortcut to work as the original pull command?

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Note that instead of 'git pull mortoray', the following works, but is of course not a shortcut:

git fetch mortoray
git merge FETCH_HEAD

This is exactly what the following does without using a "remote":

git pull ../mortoray-main/ mortoray-main

So the question is about the shortcut, I want a pull command which does the fetch and merge for me as the original pull command does:

git pull mortoray

Is there any configuration that would make this shortcut work as intended?

Answer 1

You should make sure your branch is tracking your mortoray-main branch of the mortoray repo:

git branch --set-upstream <your_current_branch> mortoray-main/mortoray

(as detailed in "How do you make an existing git branch track a remote branch?")
Then the git pull mortoray should now the branch to rebase when fetching mortoray-main/mortoray branch.

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The OP eda-qa-mort-ora-y adds:

This isn't a shortcut then, since I'll need to continually switch the tracking branch.
That is:

• this branch doesn't permanently track that remote branch, I'll be merging from different branches at different times.
• Also, this branch is actually already tracking a remote branch, which I'd like to keep as such

Regarding a shortcut, in order to reference the current branch, you can take inspiration from "git push current branch", which has idea also valid for a git pull, declaring in the .bashrc:

get_git_branch() {
  echo `git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/\1/'`
}
alias gpull='git pull mortoray-main `get_git_branch`'

If you want to add parameters for the upstream repo (ie not pulling always from mortoray-main, and for a specific local branch whose name differs from the upstream branch)

alias gpull='git pull ${1:-origin} $2:`get_git_branch`'

then gpull mortoray-main mortoray should fetch the right branch and rebase your current branch.

The OP edA-qa mort-ora-y mentions:

I don't want to specify the local or remote branch name -- I'll always be pulling from the branch called mortoray-main into whatever happens to be my local branch.

So this alias should work then:

gpull='git pull mortoray mortoray:`get_git_branch\`'