Git Hub Clone All Branches At Once

Question

I'm trying to clone an entire repository onto my machine using linux. I used

git clone <url>   

I then went into the folder where it was downloaded and typed

git branch 

in the terminal. It's only showing me master and not other branches which were in the remote repository. How do I clone all branches?

I know that for each branch in the remote I can separately use

git checkout -b <name of local branch> origin/<name of remote branch>

but is there any way other than that?

Answer 1

It's only showing me master and not other branches which were in the remote repository. How do I clone all branches?

Branches are essentially pointers to commits. When you do a git clone (or a git fetch), you retrieve all of the commits from the remote repository, and all of its branches as well.

However, git branch does not show remote branches by default. Instead, it shows you your local branches, which may or may not have any relation to branches that exist on the remote. If you run git branch --all, git will report all of the branches it knows about, both local and remote.

It's worth noting that tags do not operate this way, and there is no distinction between a local and remote tag.

Answer 2

git clone --bare <repository url goes here> .git

Then after the repo is clone with all its branches then do the following

git config --bool core.bare false

git reset --hard

Answer 3

This isn't too much complicated, very simple and straight forward steps are as follows:

After cloning the repo, run $ cd myproject

git branch -a This will show you all the remote branches.

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
  remotes/origin/experimental

If you want to work on remote branch, you'll need to create a local tracking branch:

$ git checkout -b experimental origin/experimental

Verify whether you are in the desired branch by the following command;

$ git branch

The output will like this;

*experimental
master
some branch2
some branch3 

Notice the * sign that denotes the current branch.

Answer 4

I find this to be the simple solution to clone a git repository and all remote branches:

# Clone remote repository and all branches
git clone --mirror https://github.com/test/frontend.git frontend/.git

# Change into frontend directory
cd frontend

# Update git config
git config --unset core.bare

# Checkout master branch
git checkout master

Answer 5

To download a full repository, including all branches, use the following command: git clone --mirror <URI>

This will create a folder called repository.git unless you give it a different name.

Now, this gets you a full clone of the original repository, but because it's in bare=true mode, you don't have a work tree. Effectively, what you have is the .git folder, including all branches and content. This is a fancy way of saying that you won't have direct access to the files because they're stashed away within the git system (compressed, etc).

To make this a "normal" git repo, we need to make this clone the .git folder within a new folder, which will be our usual repo folder:

mkdir <repo folder name> mv repository.git <repo folder name>/.git cd <repo folder name> git checkout master

Note that there is no single native git command to download all remote branches, so the simplest way is to make sure you have all commits pushed to the origin, and then re-download the whole repository anew using this --mirror option.

Answer 6

1. git clone --bare https://repo.git projectName
2. cd projectName

3. git push --mirror https://repo.git https://help.github.com/en/articles/duplicating-a-repository

   that makes your repo completely identical.