How to checkout a remote branch in Git?

Question

Someone pushed a "new feature" branch to the shared repo:

git push -u new_feature_branch

Now, I would like to create a copy of this branch on my local machine in order to test the new feature.

What would be the easiest way to do this? (Do I need to fetch / pull before checkout?)

Solution 1

I generally find it unnecessary to use git fetch. git pull is sufficient. git pull will synchronize your repository with the remote. The new_feature_branch will then be available.

git checkout new_feature_branch will notice the branch in origin and create a new local tracking branch for you and switch to that branch.

git pull
git checkout new_feature_branch

Solution 2

The simplest way to do this is:

git fetch
git checkout -t origin/new_feature_branch

This is only done initially. From now on you can continue working with the branch as you do for the others you use.

Solution 3

You need to fetch upstream changes so your local repository includes the relevant objects (git fetch --all or git fetch <remote>).

Afterwards you can perform a checkout using git checkout <branch> (if you like to do it explicitly, you can type git checkout -b <branch> <remote>/<branch>; the local name doesn't have to be the same as the remote). If you don't already have a local branch of that name, it will checkout the remote branch and track it.

As an alternative to this, you can use git pull <remote> <branch>, but this will - with default settings - merge the remote branch into your current, which is probably not what you want.

Solution 4

git fetch && git checkout new_feature_branch

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