How to fetch all Git branches

Question

I cloned a Git repository, which contains about five branches. However, when I do git branch I only see one of them:

$ git branch
* master
         


        

Answer 1

You will need to create local branches tracking remote branches.

Assuming that you've got only one remote called origin, this snippet will create local branches for all remote tracking ones:

for b in `git branch -r | grep -v -- '->'`; do git branch --track ${b##origin/} $b; done

After that, git fetch --all will update all local copies of remote branches.

Also, git pull --all will update your local tracking branches, but depending on your local commits and how the 'merge' configure option is set it might create a merge commit, fast-forward or fail.