remote tracking branches

Confused about what exactly a remote tracking branch is? Don’t worry, it’s not just you. Basically, there’s two types of branches: local, and remote-tracking. Local branches are pretty run of the mill, they’re just another path in the DAG that you can commit to. Remote-tracking branches have a few different purposes:

1. They’re used to link what you’re working on locally compared to what’s on the remote.
2. They will automatically know what remote branch to get changes from when you usegit pull or git fetch.
3. Even better, git status will recognize him how many commits you are in front of the remote version of the branch.

Luckily, the git branch command gives us some insight to what branch is what. For most normal, freshly cloned repositories, you’ll see this output:

$ git branch
* master

This just shows the default local branch, the master branch. If you wanted to see remote branches:

$ git branch -r
  origin/HEAD
  origin/master

And finally, if you wanted to see them all:

$ git branch -a
* master
  origin/HEAD
  origin/master

When branches are created using the --track option, they will be set up to linked to the remote branch. For example, if you wanted to create a new branch from the master branch from the origin remote, using this would set it up so it would pull from the remote and branch automatically:

$ git branch --track feature1 origin/master
Branch feature1 set up to track remote branch refs/remotes/origin/master.

From here you can git checkout the branch and work with it, and since it’s tracking the remote branch, it will know where to bring in changes from when you fetch or pull.

Local branches can also be created from any start point, be it a remote tracking branch or any treeish passed in. Here are some examples:

$ git branch --no-track feature2 origin/master 
$ git branch --no-track feature3 HEAD~4
$ git branch --no-track feature4 f21e886

Now, in these examples the --no-track option was specified. This was done to ensure that the branches did not derive from a remote tracking branch. You can tweak how this works through your ~/.gitconfig file. As the Git Cheat Sheet says:

git config branch.autosetupmerge true
tells git-branch and git-checkout to setup new branches so that git-pull(1)
will appropriately merge from that remote branch. Recommended. Without this,
you will have to add —track to your branch command or manually merge remote
tracking branches with “fetch” and then “merge”.

Hopefully this post has cleared up some confusion you may have had regarding branches and what exactly remote-tracking does. If you have more ideas on how to explain this better or related resources let us know in the comments or submit a tip!

http://gitready.com/beginner/2009/03/09/remote-tracking-branches.html