Can “git pull --all” update all my local branches?

Question

I often have at least 3 remote branches: master, staging and production. I have 3 local branches that track those remote branches.

Updating all my local branches is tedious:

git fetch --all
git rebase origin/master
git checkout staging
git rebase origin/staging
git checkout production
git rebase origin/production

I'd love to be able to just do a "git pull -all", but I haven't been able to get it to work. It seems to do a "fetch --all", then updates (fast forward or merges) the current working branch, but not the other local branches.

I'm still stuck manually switching to each local branch and updating.

Answer 1

This issue is not solved (yet), at least not easily / without scripting: see this post on git mailing list by Junio C Hamano explaining situation and providing call for a simple solution.

The major reasoning is that you shouldn't need this:

With git that is not ancient (i.e. v1.5.0 or newer), there is no reason to have local "dev" that purely track the remote anymore. If you only want to go-look-and-see, you can check out the remote tracking branch directly on a detached HEAD with "git checkout origin/dev".

Which means that the only cases we need to make it convenient for users are to handle these local branches that "track" remote ones when you do have local changes, or when you plan to have some.

If you do have local changes on "dev" that is marked to track the remove "dev", and if you are on a branch different from "dev", then we should not do anything after "git fetch" updates the remote tracking "dev". It won't fast forward anyway

The call for a solution was for an option or external script to prune local branches that follow now remote-tracking branches, rather than to keep them up-to-date by fast-forwarding, like original poster requested.

So how about "git branch --prune --remote=<upstream>" that iterates over local branches, and if

(1) it is not the current branch; and
(2) it is marked to track some branch taken from the <upstream>; and
(3) it does not have any commits on its own;

then remove that branch? "git remote --prune-local-forks <upstream>" is also fine; I do not care about which command implements the feature that much.

Note: as of git 2.10 no such solution exists. Note that the git remote prune subcommand, and git fetch --prune are about removing remote-tracking branch for branch that no longer exists on remote, not about removing local branch that tracks remote-tracking branch (for which remote-tracking branch is upstream branch).

Answer 2

If you're on Windows you can use PyGitUp which is a clone of git-up for Python. You can install it using pip with pip install --user git-up or through Scoop using scoop install git-up

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Answer 3

There are a lot of answers here but none that use git-fetch to update the local ref directly, which is a lot simpler than checking out branches, and safer than git-update-ref.

Here we use git-fetch to update non-current branches and git pull --ff-only for the current branch. It:

• Doesn't require checking out branches
• Updates branches only if they can be fast-forwarded
• Will report when it can't fast-forward

and here it is:

#!/bin/bash
currentbranchref="$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>&-)"
git branch -r | grep -v ' -> ' | while read remotebranch
do
    # Split <remote>/<branch> into remote and branchref parts
    remote="${remotebranch%%/*}"
    branchref="refs/heads/${remotebranch#*/}"

    if [ "$branchref" == "$currentbranchref" ]
    then
        echo "Updating current branch $branchref from $remote..."
        git pull --ff-only
    else
        echo "Updating non-current ref $branchref from $remote..."
        git fetch "$remote" "$branchref:$branchref"
    fi
done

From the manpage for git-fetch:

   <refspec>
       The format of a <refspec> parameter is an optional plus +, followed by the source ref <src>,
       followed by a colon :, followed by the destination ref <dst>.

       The remote ref that matches <src> is fetched, and if <dst> is not empty string, the local ref
       that matches it is fast-forwarded using <src>. If the optional plus + is used, the local ref is
       updated even if it does not result in a fast-forward update.

By specifying git fetch <remote> <ref>:<ref> (without any +) we get a fetch that updates the local ref only when it can be fast-forwarded.

Note: this assumes the local and remote branches are named the same (and that you want to track all branches), it should really use information about which local branches you have and what they are set up to track.

Answer 4

The behavior you describe for pull --all is exactly as expected, though not necessarily useful. The option is passed along to git fetch, which then fetches all refs from all remotes, instead of just the needed one; pull then merges (or in your case, rebases) the appropriate single branch.

If you want to check out other branches, you're going to have to check them out. And yes, merging (and rebasing) absolutely require a work tree, so they cannot be done without checking out the other branches. You could wrap up your described steps into a script/alias if you like, though I'd suggest joining the commands with && so that should one of them fail, it won't try to plow on.

Answer 5

It looks like many others have contributed similar solutions, but I thought I'd share what I came up with and invite others to contribute. This solution has a nice colorful output, gracefully handles your current working directory, and is fast because it doesn't do any checkouts, and leaves your working directory in tact. Also, it is just a shell script with no dependencies other than git. (only tested on OSX so far)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

gitup(){    
RED='\033[33;31m'
YELLO='\033[33;33m'
GREEN='\033[33;32m'
NC='\033[0m' # No Color

HEAD=$(git rev-parse HEAD)
CHANGED=$(git status --porcelain | wc -l)

echo "Fetching..."
git fetch --all --prune &>/dev/null
for branch in `git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' refs/heads`; do

    LOCAL=$(git rev-parse --quiet --verify $branch)
    if [ "$HEAD" = "$LOCAL" ] && [ $CHANGED -gt 0 ]; then
        echo -e "${YELLO}WORKING${NC}\t\t$branch"
    elif git rev-parse --verify --quiet $branch@{u}&>/dev/null; then
        REMOTE=$(git rev-parse --quiet --verify $branch@{u})
        BASE=$(git merge-base $branch $branch@{u})

        if [ "$LOCAL" = "$REMOTE" ]; then
           echo -e "${GREEN}OK${NC}\t\t$branch" 
        elif [ "$LOCAL" = "$BASE" ]; then
            if [ "$HEAD" = "$LOCAL" ]; then
                git merge $REMOTE&>/dev/null
            else
                git branch -f $branch $REMOTE
            fi
            echo -e "${GREEN}UPDATED${NC}\t\t$branch"
        elif [ "$REMOTE" = "$BASE" ]; then
            echo -e "${RED}AHEAD${NC}\t\t$branch"
        else
            echo -e "${RED}DIVERGED${NC}\t\t$branch"
        fi
    else
        echo -e "${RED}NO REMOTE${NC}\t$branch"
    fi
done
}

https://github.com/davestimpert/gitup

Sorry I also seem to have come up with the same name as the other tool above.

Answer 6

I use the sync subcommand of hub to automate this. Hub is aliased as git, so the command I type is:

git sync

This updates all local branches that have a matching upstream branch. From the man page:

• If the local branch is outdated, fast-forward it;
• If the local branch contains unpushed work, warn about it;
• If the branch seems merged and its upstream branch was deleted, delete it.

It also handles stashing/unstashing uncommitted changes on the current branch.

I used to use a similar tool called git-up, but it's no longer maintained, and git sync does almost exactly the same thing.