How to clone all remote branches in Git?

Question

I have a master and a development branch, both pushed to GitHub. I've cloned, pulled, and fetched, but I remain unable to get anything other than the master branch back.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but I have read the manual and I'm getting no joy at all.

Answer 1

Cloning from a local repo will not work with git clone & git fetch: a lot of branches/tags will remain unfetched.

To get a clone with all branches and tags.

git clone --mirror git://example.com/myproject myproject-local-bare-repo.git

To get a clone with all branches and tags but also with a working copy:

git clone --mirror git://example.com/myproject myproject/.git
cd myproject
git config --unset core.bare
git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead
git checkout master

Answer 2

This Bash script helped me out:

#!/bin/bash
for branch in $(git branch --all | grep '^\s*remotes' | egrep --invert-match '(:?HEAD|master)$'); do
    git branch --track "${branch##*/}" "$branch"
done

It will create tracking branches for all remote branches, except master (which you probably got from the original clone command). I think you might still need to do a

git fetch --all
git pull --all

to be sure.

One liner: git branch -a | grep -v HEAD | perl -ne 'chomp($_); s|^\*?\s*||; if (m|(.+)/(.+)| && not $d{$2}) {print qq(git branch --track $2 $1/$2\n)} else {$d{$_}=1}' | csh -xfs As usual: test in your setup before copying rm -rf universe as we know it

Credits for one-liner go to user cfi

Answer 3

You only need to use "git clone" to get all branches.

git clone <your_http_url>

Even though you only see master branch, you can use "git branch -a" to see all branches.

git branch -a

And you can switch to any branch which you already have.

git checkout <your_branch_name>

Don't worry that after you "git clone", you don't need to connect with the remote repo, "git branch -a" and "git checkout " can be run successfully when you close your wifi. So it is proved that when you do "git clone", it already has copied all branches from the remote repo. After that, you don't need the remote repo, your local already has all branches' codes.

Answer 4

Here is another short one-liner command which creates local branches for all remote branches:

(git branch -r | sed -n '/->/!s#^  origin/##p' && echo master) | xargs -L1 git checkout

It works also properly if tracking local branches are already created. You can call it after the first git clone or any time later.

If you do not need to have master branch checked out after cloning, use

git branch -r | sed -n '/->/!s#^  origin/##p'| xargs -L1 git checkout

Answer 5

I wrote this small Powershell functions to be able to checkout all my git branches, that are on origin remote.

Function git-GetAllRemoteBranches {
     iex "git branch -r"                       <# get all remote branches #> `
     | % { $_ -Match "origin\/(?'name'\S+)" }  <# select only names of the branches #> `
     | % { Out-Null; $matches['name'] }        <# write does names #>
}


Function git-CheckoutAllBranches {
    git-GetAllRemoteBranches `
        | % { iex "git checkout $_" }          <# execute ' git checkout <branch>' #>
}

More git functions can be found on my git settings repo

Answer 6

First, clone a remote Git repository and cd into it:

$ git clone git://example.com/myproject
$ cd myproject

Next, look at the local branches in your repository:

$ git branch
* master

But there are other branches hiding in your repository! You can see these using the -a flag:

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

If you just want to take a quick peek at an upstream branch, you can check it out directly:

$ git checkout origin/experimental

But if you want to work on that branch, you'll need to create a local tracking branch which is done automatically by:

$ git checkout experimental

and you will see

Branch experimental set up to track remote branch experimental from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'experimental'

That last line throws some people: "New branch" - huh? What it really means is that the branch is taken from the index and created locally for you. The previous line is actually more informative as it tells you that the branch is being set up to track the remote branch, which usually means the origin/branch_name branch

Now, if you look at your local branches, this is what you'll see:

$ git branch
* experimental
  master

You can actually track more than one remote repository using git remote.

$ git remote add win32 git://example.com/users/joe/myproject-win32-port
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
  remotes/origin/experimental
  remotes/win32/master
  remotes/win32/new-widgets

At this point, things are getting pretty crazy, so run gitk to see what's going on:

$ gitk --all &