Remote tracking branches

Are remote tracking branches leaving you feeling puzzled? You’re not alone. Let’s break it down. Essentially, there are two types of branches in Git: local and remote-tracking. Local branches are straightforward—they’re paths in the DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) where you can commit changes. Remote-tracking branches serve several purposes:

Linking Local and Remote Work: They connect your local work with its counterpart on the remote repository.

Automatic Syncing: They automatically determine which remote branch to fetch changes from when you use commands like git pull or git fetch.

Tracking Commit Differential: git status recognizes how many commits you are ahead of (or behind) the remote version of the branch.

Thankfully, the git branch command offers insights into branch types. For instance, to view remote branches in a freshly cloned repository, you’ll see:

$ git branch -r
origin/HEAD
origin/master

To display all branches, including local and remote, use:

$ git branch -a

master
origin/HEAD
origin/master

When creating branches with the –track option, they’re set up to automatically link to the remote branch. For instance:

$ git branch --track feature1 origin/master

This command sets up feature1 to track changes from the origin/master branch. Subsequently, when you fetch or pull changes, Git knows where to retrieve them from.

Additionally, local branches can be created from any starting point, including a remote tracking branch or any other reference. For example:

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

In these examples, the –no-track option was specified to ensure the branches didn’t derive from a remote tracking branch.

To streamline branch creation, you can configure Git to automatically set up tracking branches by default. Update your ~/.gitconfig file with the following:

git config branch.autosetupmerge true

This setting tells Git to set up new branches so that git pull will appropriately merge from the corresponding remote branch.

Understanding remote tracking branches can simplify your Git workflow. If you have suggestions on improving this explanation or additional resources to share, let us know in the comments or submit a tip!