CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgithub
stanhook
stanhook

Reputation: 69

Clone a repository and checkout branch

I have cloned a private repository locally that has 3 branches - master, dev and staging. When it is cloned I am in the master branch. When I list branches:

git branch -a

I see all the branches. When I run:

git checkout dev

nothing happens and I am still in the master branch. I have tried to pull and fetch to get the other branches with no luck. I can't figure out how to switch to any of the other branches.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 6485

Answers (3)

torek
torek

Reputation: 488193

This is a guess, but I've reproduced the behavior:

sh-3.2$ mkdir txx
sh-3.2$ cd txx
sh-3.2$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in ...
sh-3.2$ echo test branch name thing > README.md
sh-3.2$ git add README.md
sh-3.2$ git commit -m initial
[master (root-commit) 7dc0be2] initial
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 README.md
sh-3.2$ echo this is a file named dev > dev
sh-3.2$ git add dev
sh-3.2$ git commit -m 'add file named dev'
[master ac01ba6] add file named dev
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 dev
sh-3.2$ git remote add origin .
sh-3.2$ git update-ref refs/remotes/origin/master master
sh-3.2$ git update-ref refs/remotes/origin/dev master
sh-3.2$ echo foo >> dev
sh-3.2$ git checkout dev

Nothing seems to have happened here, but actually, something did: the file dev was checked out, destructively. Here are its contents:

sh-3.2$ cat dev
this is a file named dev

and here is the confirmation that we are still on master:

sh-3.2$ git status
On branch master
nothing to commit, working tree clean

The working tree clean is a consequence of destroying the updated dev, replacing it with the copy extracted from the index by git checkout.

Note that all of this requires a slightly older version of Git:

sh-3.2$ git --version
git version 2.20.1

A more modern one tells us about the problem. Doing the same thing in Git 2.24 produces:

$ git checkout dev
fatal: 'dev' could be both a local file and a tracking branch.
Please use -- (and optionally --no-guess) to disambiguate

This sort of thing is the reason git checkout is now two separate commands, git switch and git restore. Using git switch:

$ git switch dev
M       dev
Branch 'dev' set up to track remote branch 'dev' from 'origin'.
Switched to a new branch 'dev'

does the desired thing.

Upvotes: 10

Pavan Tatikonda
Pavan Tatikonda

Reputation: 49

You can try below command and see if it works "git clone --branch url" It is fetching all the branches and checking out to the branch we specify one.

Upvotes: -1

hiddeninthewifi
hiddeninthewifi

Reputation: 47

My guess is that you haven't fetched the remote branch. By default, git checkout only gets one branch. You need to do a combination of

git fetch

followed by

git checkout dev

After that, you should see a message of

Switched to branch 'dev'

Your branch is up to date with 'origin/dev'

Upvotes: 0

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