I'm trying to checkout a branch that I've just fetched from my upstream remote repo but it doesn't seem to work.
$ git fetch upstream
Fetching upstream
From github.com:group/repo
* [new branch] feature-branch -> upstream/feature-branch
$ git checkout feature-branch
error: pathspec 'feature-branch' did not match any file(s) known to git.
Am I doing something wrong?
The branch is likely present in more than one remote. (You can confirm this with git branch --list --remotes '*/feature-branch'.) git checkout only creates branches like that if they’re unambiguous. From git-checkout(1):
If
<branch>is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it<remote>) with a matching name, treat as equivalent to$ git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>
So you’ll need to do that instead:
git checkout -b feature-branch --track upstream/feature-branch
You're wanting git to understand the "shortcut" checkout notation, but it seems to find it inapplicable. Perhaps do multiple remotes have branches named feature_branch?
Well, anyway, git checkout -b feature-branch -track upstream/feature-branch ought to work
This post solved it for me. I had forgotten that I had done a shallow clone of the repo. How to convert a Git shallow clone to a full clone?
The below command (git version 1.8.3) will convert the shallow clone to regular one
git fetch --unshallow
Then, to get access to all the branches on origin (thanks @Peter in the comments)
git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"
git fetch origin
There are some automations that can happen when you ask to checkout a local branch that doesn't exist (create it from some remote branch, for example), but this won't fail for you: git checkout upstream/feature-branch. The only thing is that no local branch is being created.
When you run git checkout feature-branch git try to remove all unsaved changes in file named feature-branch. For checkout your branch use -b option like this git checkout -b feature-branch.
