Git: can't switch to new remote branch

Question

I have an account on github and I use it from two different machines. On one, I created a new branch myNewBranch and switched to it. Then I did my modifications to my code, I committed and pushed to myNewBranch.

On the second machine, I can't figure out how to push to it.

$ git pull origin myNewBranch
From https://github.com/myUsername/myProject
 * branch            myNewBranch -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up-to-date.

[ I had already successfully pulled from it]

Then I try to switch to it, but I get an error:

$ git checkout myNewBranch
error: pathspec 'myNewBranch' did not match any file(s) known to git.

What am I missing?

Solution 1

You need to fetch the data onto your local repository on machine 2 first:

$ git fetch origin
$ git checkout origin/myNewBranch

Solution 2

My guess on what happened there is a remote origin/myNewBranch, but not a local branch myNewBranch. What your command did was to fetch origin/myNewBranch to your current local branch. When you did the git checkout myNewBranch, the error happened because there was no local branch named myNewBranch. I suggest try git checkout -b myNewBranch origin/myNewBranch.

Solution 3

Try doing git checkout origin/myNewBranch.

Comments

[Ricky Robinson]

That worked, thanks! But I did a big mess: in the actions described in my question, I pulled from from myNewBranch to a different branch. Now I would actually like to keep this different branch unaltered remotely and push to myNewBranch the changes I made. Is this possible?

[Ricky Robinson]

Found it: stackoverflow.com/questions/8550586/…