Pull

When fetching we keep the local repository's remotes updated. Fetching does, as we have seen, not alter the local repository state.

We can use the git pull command to fetch and merge changes from the remote repository.

This is the same as running git fetch followed by git merge as we just did before.

Exercise: Add a change in the remote repository and pull it

Navigate to the learn-git repository.

Make sure you are on the main branch.

Append some text, e.g. A remote change, to the README.md file in the remote repository.

Commit the change.

Navigate to the remote-git repository.

Pull the changes from the remote repository.

Solution: Add a change in the remote repository and pull it

# navigate to the "learn-git" repository
git checkout main
echo "A remote change" >> README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m "remote change"

# navigate to the "remote-git" repository
git pull

Output:

remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 327 bytes | 327.00 KiB/s, done.
From ../learn-git
   058f2b5..d8df0e5  feature-delete-test -> origin/feature-delete-test
There is no tracking information for the current branch.
Please specify which branch you want to merge with.
See git-pull(1) for details.

    git pull <remote> <branch>

If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with:

    git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<branch> main

We got an error. Why?

This is because we have not set up a tracking branch.

We can do this by running the command:

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/main main

Output:

Branch 'main' set up to track remote branch 'main' from 'origin'.

If we run git pull again, we will see that the changes are pulled from the remote repository.

Output:

remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 297 bytes | 148.00 KiB/s, done.
From ../learn-git
   1bfa0c5..7142285  main       -> origin/main
Updating 1bfa0c5..7142285
Fast-forward
 README.md | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Pull with rebase

We can also use the --rebase flag with the git pull command.

This will rebase the local changes on top of the remote changes. Again, useful for keeping a clean history. The software developers on your team will love this.

git pull --rebase

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