clone remote branch with git

clone_remote_branch.md

This is taken from here. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/67699/how-do-i-clone-all-remote-branches-with-git/72156#72156 Want this as a gist because I always come back to this posting.

First, clone a remote git repository and cd into it:

$ git clone git://example.com/myproject
$ cd myproject

Next, look at the local branches in your repository:

$ git branch
* main

But there are other branches hiding in your repository! You can see these using the -a flag:

$ git branch -a
* main
  origin/HEAD
  origin/main
  origin/v1.0-stable
  origin/experimental

If you already have a existing repository but there is a new branch that is yet listed do a:

git fetch

If you just want to take a quick peek at an upstream branch, you can check it out directly:

$ git checkout origin/experimental

But if you want to work on that branch, you'll need to create a local tracking branch:

$ git checkout -b experimental origin/experimental

Now, if you look at your local branches, this is what you'll see:

$ git branch
  main
* experimental

You can actually track more than one remote repository using git remote.

$ git remote add win32 git://example.com/users/joe/myproject-win32-port
$ git branch -a
* main
  origin/HEAD
  origin/main
  origin/v1.0-stable
  origin/experimental
  win32/main
  win32/new-widgets

At this point, things are getting pretty crazy, so run gitk to see what's going on:

$ gitk --all &

Thanks Fabian, Good Tutorial, really helped me with this of local and remote branches. Regards.

I realize this is 5+ years old but I stumbled across this while trying to figure out how to clone only a single repository. This helped me way more than any of the other answers I found. Thank you!

Thank you very much!!!

Thanks for this!!!

thanks - this was a good summary. I wanted to make a copy of my remote feature branch before force pushing a rebased local version so

$ git checkout -b security-blanket origin/feature-i-already-have-locally

gave me a little extra security to make sure I didn't mess anything up during my merge resolutions.

Thanks for this!

Thanks! Very helpful

Nice. I did not know that there where comments on this gist. Seems like GitHub changed something on the notification options…

You are all welcome.

This is helpful, Thank you.

Something to note.. for git checkout -b experimental origin/experimental, you can use git checkout --track origin/experimental. Here is a link to a good explanation of what the difference between both are:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10002239/difference-between-git-checkout-track-origin-branch-and-git-checkout-b-branch

Thank you! This was really good explained and helped me a lot : )

Thank you!

git checkout remote_branch_name