Question:
TL;DR: I have a “tracked” branch that I can’t pull.
So here I am in “bucket-4”:
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$ git branch -v bucket-1 410f7b5 * gh-53 * gh-48 * "Share App" bucket-2 7ed70a2 * upgrade to SOLR 3.3.0 bucket-3 400ffe4 * emergency fix prod issue * bucket-4 64c2414 Merge branch 'bucket-3' into bucket-4 master 8dc4854 [ahead 1] * gh-73 |
I’d like to pull in changes from my remote:
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$ git pull You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you want to merge with, and 'branch.bucket-4.merge' in your configuration file does not tell me, either. Please specify which branch you want to use on the command line and try again (e.g. 'git pull See git-pull(1) for details. If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to use something like the following in your configuration file: [branch "bucket-4"] remote = merge = [remote " url = fetch = See git-config(1) for details. |
Hmm, odd, I thought I already added “bucket-4” as a tracking branch. Let’s see:
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$ git remote show origin * remote origin Fetch URL: git@github.com:abcd/main.git Push URL: git@github.com:abcd/main.git HEAD branch (remote HEAD is ambiguous, may be one of the following): bucket-3 master Remote branches: bucket-1 tracked bucket-2 tracked bucket-3 tracked bucket-4 tracked master tracked Local branches configured for 'git pull': bucket-1 merges with remote bucket-1 bucket-2 merges with remote bucket-2 bucket-3 merges with remote bucket-3 master merges with remote master Local refs configured for 'git push': bucket-1 pushes to bucket-1 (up to date) bucket-2 pushes to bucket-2 (up to date) bucket-3 pushes to bucket-3 (up to date) bucket-4 pushes to bucket-4 (local out of date) master pushes to master (fast-forwardable) |
Indeed, bucket-4 is marked as “tracked”, yet somehow it’s configured for push, but not pull.
Looking at my .git/config file, I see that I have “remote” and “merge” entries for most of my branches, but not for bucket-4. How is it even considered “tracked” without this?
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[remote "origin"] url = git@github.com:abcd/main.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* [branch "master"] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/master [branch "rel-2011-07-07"] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/rel-2011-07-07 [branch "bucket-1"] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/bucket-1 [branch "bucket-2"] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/bucket-2 [branch] autosetupmerge = true [branch "bucket-3"] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/bucket-3 |
I see that the likely solution here is to add remote/merge entries for bucket-4 in my config file. But how is it considered “tracked” without this? bucket-4 was created locally, then pushed to the server from this repo, so I suspect that somehow I didn’t set up tracking properly for this branch.
Is there some configuration I can add in order to make all local branches track their remotes properly in the future?
Answer:
It says bucket-4 pushes to bucket-4 just because the default when pushing a branch is to push it to one with a matching name on the remote. (Note that this is still the default, even if the local branch is tracking a remote-tracking branch and the remote-tracking branch corresponds to a branch with a different name in the remote repository.)
The simplest way to set up the association between your bucket-4 and bucket-4 in origin is to make sure that the next time you push, you do:
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git push -u origin bucket-4 |
Alternatively, you can do:
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git branch --set-upstream-to origin/bucket-4 |
To answer a couple of your questions directly:
How is it even considered “tracked” without this?
In this case it isn’t – it’s not tracking the remote-tracking branch in any sense if there’s no branch.bucket-4.merge or branch.bucket-4.remote in your git config. The output from git remote show origin is just showing you where the branch would be pushed by default.
Is there some configuration I can add in order to make all local branches track their remotes properly in the future?
I don’t think that there is. When you created bucket-4 locally, as I assume happened, the remote-tracking branch didn’t exist, so it can’t be set up at that point – it would be very confusing default behaviour. You just need to remember to add -u to your first git push of that branch to its upstream repository.
I hope that’s of some help.