How to cleanly get/copy a remote git branch to local repository

I want an exact "copy" of a remote branch "copied" to a specific local branch.

Say, for example, a team member has created an experimental feature, which he has checked into a branch called experiment on the remote repository. I want to be able to checkout a new branch on my local repository, and "copy" the experiment branch, as-is, to my newly checked out branch.

I don't want to merge it with my code - I want to completely overwrite my code so that I can have a clean look at what he's done on the "experiment" branch.

How would one "get" (fetch/pull/whatever...) a remote branch that someone else has committed to the remote repository to your own local repository, in a way that does not try and perform a merge on your own local code?

Solution 1:

If you don't care about merging:

git reset --hard <remote>/<branch_name>

This will exactly do what you want: no merging, no rebasing, simply put the local branch to exactly the same state as the remote is.

In your case however, you don't need that. You want to create a new local branch that has the same state as the remote, so specify the remote branch when creating the local one with git checkout:

git checkout -b <my_new_branch> <remote>/<branch_name>

If you want to use the same name locally, you can shorten that to:

git checkout <branch_name>

You would use git reset --hard if you already have a local branch (for example with some changes in it), discard any modifications that you made and instead take the exact version of the remote branch.

To be sure that you have the latest state of the remote branch, use git fetch <remote> before either checking out or resetting.

Solution 2:

I don’t have enough rep to comment, but I’d like to add an example for those still struggling. In my example, I’m using Github as my remote and copying the branch to my Linux server environment/terminal.

First, you’ll want to run git fetch To make sure you’re up to date.

Using the example of

git checkout -b <my_new_branch> <remote>/<branch_name>

With a remote branch named “picklerick”

I ran

git checkout -b picklerick remotes/origin/picklerick

I probably could have just used remote/picklerick for my remote path, but this worked for me.

Solution 3:

Suppose git remote command outputs origin as a result, then

git fetch origin remote_branch_name:local_branch_name

will create a local branch which is an exact copy of a remote branch you need to.

EDIT: There is an alternative more modern solution:

git switch remote_branch_name

the command will create a local branch with the same name as the specified remote branch.