Travis - how do I merge some files from another branch of the same repo?

Question

At a certain point in my Travis-CI deployment process I want to merge a set of files from a different branch in the same repo.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to do this. Simply setting up a bash script to run commands like git checkout origin master gives me errors like:

error: pathspec 'origin' did not match any file(s) known to git.
error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.

So my question is: how can I get my hands on files from another branche in Travis?

Thanks

Answer 1

The problem is that Travis is not aware of other branches on origin and doesn't have copies of them locally. You have to run git fetch to resolve this:

git fetch --depth=1 git@github.com:your-org/your-repo.git refs/heads/other-branch:refs/remotes/origin/other-branch

This command tells git fetch to copy the branch at refs/heads/other-branch to the local machine at refs/remotes/origin/other-branch

Once you've done this you will then be able to get your hands on files from other-branch using standard git commands.

Answer 2

Remote branches are referred to like this: the-remote/the-branch... so you need to say something like: git checkout origin/master. It also works for a lot (if not all?) operations.... diff, cherry-pick, rebase, merge, etc etc