Remote Branches
Remote-tracking branches are references to the state of remote branches. They’re local references that you can’t move; Git moves them for you whenever you do any network communication, to make sure they accurately represent the state of the remote repository. Think of them as bookmarks, to remind you where the branches in your remote repositories were the last time you connected to them.
If you do some work on your local master branch, and, in the meantime, someone else pushes to git.ourcompany.com and updates its master branch, then your histories move forward differently. Also, as long as you stay out of contact with your origin server, your origin/master pointer doesn’t move.
To synchronize your work with a given remote, you run a git fetch command (in our case, git fetch origin ). This command looks up which server “origin” is (in this case, it’s git.ourcompany.com ), fetches any data from it that you don’t yet have, and updates your local database, moving your origin/master pointer to its new, more up-to-date position.
Now, you can run git fetch teamone to fetch everything the remote teamone server has that you don’t have yet. Because that server has a subset of the data your origin server has right now, Git fetches no data but sets a remote-tracking branch called teamone/master to point to the commit that teamone has as its master branch.
Pushing
When you want to share a branch with the world, you need to push it up to a remote to which you have write access. Your local branches aren’t automatically synchronized to the remotes you write to — you have to explicitly push the branches you want to share. That way, you can use private branches for work you don’t want to share, and push up only the topic branches you want to collaborate on.
If you have a branch named serverfix that you want to work on with others, you can push it up the same way you pushed your first branch. Run git push
:
If you’re using an HTTPS URL to push over, the Git server will ask you for your username and password for authentication. By default it will prompt you on the terminal for this information so the server can tell if you’re allowed to push.
For more information on the various credential caching options available, see Credential Storage.
The next time one of your collaborators fetches from the server, they will get a reference to where the server’s version of serverfix is under the remote branch origin/serverfix :
It’s important to note that when you do a fetch that brings down new remote-tracking branches, you don’t automatically have local, editable copies of them. In other words, in this case, you don’t have a new serverfix branch — you have only an origin/serverfix pointer that you can’t modify.
This gives you a local branch that you can work on that starts where origin/serverfix is.
Tracking Branches
In fact, this is so common that there’s even a shortcut for that shortcut. If the branch name you’re trying to checkout (a) doesn’t exist and (b) exactly matches a name on only one remote, Git will create a tracking branch for you:
To set up a local branch with a different name than the remote branch, you can easily use the first version with a different local branch name:
So here we can see that our iss53 branch is tracking origin/iss53 and is “ahead” by two, meaning that we have two commits locally that are not pushed to the server. We can also see that our master branch is tracking origin/master and is up to date. Next we can see that our serverfix branch is tracking the server-fix-good branch on our teamone server and is ahead by three and behind by one, meaning that there is one commit on the server we haven’t merged in yet and three commits locally that we haven’t pushed. Finally we can see that our testing branch is not tracking any remote branch.
It’s important to note that these numbers are only since the last time you fetched from each server. This command does not reach out to the servers, it’s telling you about what it has cached from these servers locally. If you want totally up to date ahead and behind numbers, you’ll need to fetch from all your remotes right before running this. You could do that like this:
Pulling
While the git fetch command will fetch all the changes on the server that you don’t have yet, it will not modify your working directory at all. It will simply get the data for you and let you merge it yourself. However, there is a command called git pull which is essentially a git fetch immediately followed by a git merge in most cases. If you have a tracking branch set up as demonstrated in the last section, either by explicitly setting it or by having it created for you by the clone or checkout commands, git pull will look up what server and branch your current branch is tracking, fetch from that server and then try to merge in that remote branch.
Generally it’s better to simply use the fetch and merge commands explicitly as the magic of git pull can often be confusing.
Deleting Remote Branches
Basically all this does is remove the pointer from the server. The Git server will generally keep the data there for a while until a garbage collection runs, so if it was accidentally deleted, it’s often easy to recover.
Удалённые ветки
Удалённые ссылки — это ссылки (указатели) в ваших удалённых репозиториях, включая ветки, теги и так далее. Полный список удалённых ссылок можно получить с помощью команды git ls-remote или команды git remote show для получения удалённых веток и дополнительной информации. Тем не менее, более распространенным способом является использование веток слежения.
Ветки слежения — это ссылки на определённое состояние удалённых веток. Это локальные ветки, которые нельзя перемещать; Git перемещает их автоматически при любой коммуникации с удаленным репозиторием, чтобы гарантировать точное соответствие с ним. Представляйте их как закладки для напоминания о том, где ветки в удалённых репозиториях находились во время последнего подключения к ним.
Для синхронизации ваших изменений с удаленным сервером выполните команду git fetch (в нашем случае git fetch origin ). Эта команда определяет какому серверу соответствует «origin» (в нашем случае это git.ourcompany.com ), извлекает оттуда данные, которых у вас ещё нет, и обновляет локальную базу данных, сдвигая указатель origin/master на новую позицию.
Отправка изменений
Когда вы хотите поделиться веткой, вам необходимо отправить её на удалённый сервер, где у вас есть права на запись. Ваши локальные ветки автоматически не синхронизируются с удалёнными при отправке — вам нужно явно указать те ветки, которые вы хотите отправить. Таким образом, вы можете использовать свои личные ветки для работы, которую не хотите показывать, а отправлять только те тематические ветки, над которыми вы хотите работать с кем-то совместно.
Если вы используете HTTPS URL для отправки изменений, Git-сервер будет спрашивать имя пользователя и пароль для аутентификации. По умолчанию вам будет предложено ввести эти данные в терминале, чтобы сервер мог определить разрешена ли вам отправка изменений.
Для получения более подробной информации о различных вариантах кэша учётных данных обратитесь к разделу Хранилище учётных данных.
В следующий раз, когда один из ваших соавторов будет получать обновления с сервера, он получит ссылку на то, на что указывает serverfix на сервере, как удалённую ветку origin/serverfix :
Отслеживание веток
В действительности, это настолько распространённая команда, что существует сокращение для этого сокращения. Если вы пытаетесь извлечь ветку, которая не существует, но существует только одна удалённая ветка с точно таким же именем, то Git автоматически создаст ветку слежения:
Чтобы создать локальную ветку с именем, отличным от имени удалённой ветки, просто укажите другое имя:
Важно отметить, что эти цифры описывают состояние на момент последнего получения данных с каждого из серверов. Эта команда не обращается к серверам, а лишь говорит вам о том, какая информация с этих серверов сохранена в локальном кэше. Если вы хотите иметь актуальную информацию об этих числах, вам необходимо получить данные со всех ваших удалённых серверов перед запуском команды. Сделать это можно вот так:
Получение изменений
Удаление веток на удалённом сервере
Всё, что делает эта строка — удаляет указатель на сервере. Как правило, Git сервер хранит данные пока не запустится сборщик мусора, поэтому если ветка была удалена случайно, чаще всего её легко восстановить.
Remote Branches
Remote branches are references (pointers) to the state of branches in your remote repositories. They’re local branches that you can’t move; they’re moved automatically for you whenever you do any network communication. Remote branches act as bookmarks to remind you where the branches on your remote repositories were the last time you connected to them.
If you do some work on your local master branch, and, in the meantime, someone else pushes to git.ourcompany.com and updates its master branch, then your histories move forward differently. Also, as long as you stay out of contact with your origin server, your origin/master pointer doesn’t move.
To synchronize your work, you run a git fetch origin command. This command looks up which server “origin” is (in this case, it’s git.ourcompany.com ), fetches any data from it that you don’t yet have, and updates your local database, moving your origin/master pointer to its new, more up-to-date position.
Now, you can run git fetch teamone to fetch everything the remote teamone server has that you don’t have yet. Because that server has a subset of the data your origin server has right now, Git fetches no data but sets a remote branch called teamone/master to point to the commit that teamone has as its master branch.
Pushing
When you want to share a branch with the world, you need to push it up to a remote that you have write access to. Your local branches aren’t automatically synchronized to the remotes you write to – you have to explicitly push the branches you want to share. That way, you can use private branches for work you don’t want to share, and push up only the topic branches you want to collaborate on.
If you have a branch named serverfix that you want to work on with others, you can push it up the same way you pushed your first branch. Run git push (remote) (branch) :
If you’re using an HTTPS URL to push over, the Git server will ask you for your username and password for authentication. By default it will prompt you on the terminal for this information so the server can tell if you’re allowed to push.
For more information on the various credential caching options available, see Credential Storage.
The next time one of your collaborators fetches from the server, they will get a reference to where the server’s version of serverfix is under the remote branch origin/serverfix :
It’s important to note that when you do a fetch that brings down new remote branches, you don’t automatically have local, editable copies of them. In other words, in this case, you don’t have a new serverfix branch – you only have an origin/serverfix pointer that you can’t modify.
This gives you a local branch that you can work on that starts where origin/serverfix is.
Tracking Branches
To set up a local branch with a different name than the remote branch, you can easily use the first version with a different local branch name:
So here we can see that our iss53 branch is tracking origin/iss53 and is “ahead” by two, meaning that we have two commits locally that are not pushed to the server. We can also see that our master branch is tracking origin/master and is up to date. Next we can see that our serverfix branch is tracking the server-fix-good branch on our teamone server and is ahead by three and behind by one, meaning that there is one commit on the server we haven’t merged in yet and three commits locally that we haven’t pushed. Finally we can see that our testing branch is not tracking any remote branch.
Pulling
While the git fetch command will fetch down all the changes on the server that you don’t have yet, it will not modify your working directory at all. It will simply get the data for you and let you merge it yourself. However, there is a command called git pull which is essentially a git fetch immediately followed by a git merge in most cases. If you have a tracking branch set up as demonstrated in the last section, either by explicitly setting it or by having it created for you by the clone or checkout commands, git pull will look up what server and branch your current branch is tracking, fetch from that server and then try to merge in that remote branch.
Generally it’s better to simply use the fetch and merge commands explicitly as the magic of git pull can often be confusing.
Deleting Remote Branches
Basically all this does is remove the pointer from the server. The Git server will generally keep the data there for a while until a garbage collection runs, so if it was accidentally deleted, it’s often easy to recover.
