How can I check out a GitHub pull request with git

Question

I'd like to check out a previously created pull request (created via GitHub web interface). I searched and found different places where a refs/pull or refs/pull/pr

But when I add fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/* to the git config file and do a git fetch

What I'm doing wrong? Should GitHub create automatically the pull/xyz stuff, or do I have to configure something?

Answer 1

To fetch a remote PR into your local repo,

git fetch origin pull/ID/head:BRANCHNAME

where ID is the pull request id and BRANCHNAME is the name of the new branch that you want to create. Once you have created the branch, then simply

git checkout BRANCHNAME

See the official GitHub documentation for more.

Answer 2

I accidentally ended up writing almost the same as provided by git-extras. So if you prefer a single custom command instead of installing a bunch of other extra commands, just place this git-pr file somewhere in your $PATH and then you can just write:

git pr 42
// or
git pr upstream 42
// or
git pr https://github.com/peerigon/phridge/pull/1

Answer 3

I prefer to fetch and checkout without creating a local branch and to be in HEAD detached state. It allows me quickly to check the pull request without polluting my local machine with unnecessary local branches.

git fetch upstream pull/ID/head && git checkout FETCH_HEAD

where ID is a pull request ID and upstream where is original pull request has been created (it could be origin, for example).

I hope it helps.

Answer 4

The problem with some of options above, is that if someone pushes more commits to the PR after opening the PR, they won't give you the most updated version. For me what worked best is - go to the PR, and press 'Commits', scroll to the bottom to see the most recent commit hash and then simply use git checkout, i.e.

git checkout <commit number>

in the above example

git checkout 0ba1a50

Answer 5

Referencing Steven Penny's answer, it's best to create a test branch and test the PR. So here's what you would do.

1. Create a test branch to merge the PR into locally. Assuming you're on the master branch:

git checkout -b test

2. Get the PR changes into the test branch

git pull origin pull/939/head:test

Now, you can safely test the changes on this local test branch (in this case, named test) and once you're satisfied, can merge it as usual from GitHub.

Answer 6

You can use git config command to write a new rule to .git/config to fetch pull requests from the repository:

$ git config --local --add remote.origin.fetch '+refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/*'

And then just:

$ git fetch origin
Fetching origin
remote: Counting objects: 4, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 4 (delta 2), reused 4 (delta 2), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (4/4), done.
From https://github.com/container-images/memcached
 * [new ref]         refs/pull/2/head -> origin/pr/2
 * [new ref]         refs/pull/3/head -> origin/pr/3