A workflow with remote branches on git

By Nacho Martín on 12 March 2010

This is the workflow that we are currently using for work with remote branches.

Pushing local branch to remote

git push origin my-branch:refs/heads/my-branch
git config branch.my-branch.remote origin
git config branch.my-branch.merge refs/heads/my-branch

That will create a new branch in the remote repository and the appropriate ref.

Pulling from remote to local branch

Before checking out, we need to fetch the branch, because our repo is not aware of it. Run this to understand what I mean.:

git remote show origin

So… let’s fetch and then we’ll be able to do the checkout.

git fetch
git checkout -b my-branch origin/my-branch

You can add a –track to the last command to set up upstream configuration (see the docs)