Git Fetch Command

Git Fetch Command: Hey there! Welcome back to our Git tutorial series. In the last tutorial, we learned about the awesome Git push command. Basically, the Git push command pushes the changes that you’ve made in your local repository up to the remote repository. This is great for team collaboration because it enables everyone to see and work with each other’s changes.

However, this was only one aspect of the story in which users have pushed their local changes to the remote repository. On the other hand, all other team members need to sync these changes from the remote repository down to their local repositories. Therefore, for this process, team members must fetch the changes and merge them into their local repositories.

In this tutorial, we will provide an overview of how to use Git Fetch and Git Merge to sync changes from the remote repository to your local machine. These are two essential tools for developers who use Git regularly, so understanding how they work is critical.

Post Type:GIT Tutorial
Published On:www.softwaretestingo.com
Applicable For:Freshers & Experience
Get Updates:Join Our Telegram Group

What is Git Fetch Command?

The Git fetch command downloads commit, refs, and files from a remote repository to the local repository. In other words, this command allows you to see all updates on the remote repository without affecting your working repository.

Git Fetch Command 1

How To Use Git Fetch Command?

Before we use the command, we should make some changes to our remote repository so that when we fetch them through the local repository, the remote repository will be updated.

Follow the below steps for a GitHub account:

Open the GitHub account and open the respective repository.

Git Fetch Command 2

Click over the file name, and then the file will be opened

Git Fetch Command 3

After that, Click on the Pencil Icon to Edit the File

Git Fetch Command 4

After editing the file, scroll down to the end, and there click on commit changes by giving a meaningful description.

Git Fetch Command 5

Then, check the modified file where you can notice the changes.

Git Fetch Command 6

Until this, we have made the changes in the remote repository, but now we need to fetch those changes to the local repository.

To Fetch Changes From the Remote to the Local Repository

Open the Gitbash and Navigate to the working directory. There, you can confirm that any changes are there in that working directory by executing the git status command.

If there are no changes in that working directory, then you can run the Git Fetch command.

Git Fetch Command 7

You can confirm whether your local repository is updated or not by the Git log command. Your screen should show a similar output as the image above; if you have successfully fetched changes from your remote repository, the changes are available on the local repository but will not reflect on the local repository files.

To be available, for the latest change in the local repository, we have to execute the merge command so that the latest changes in the remote repository will be merged with the local repository, and the changes will be reflected in the local repository.

Options in Git Fetch Command

If you want to use the Git fetch command efficiently, there are some options you can use. Let us discuss these:

All Option

This will fetch all the remote files, ref once.

git fetch –all

Git Fetch Command 8

Dry Run Option

If you want to see how a command would execute without making any changes, use the dry run option.

git fetch –dry-run

Categories GIT
Avatar for Softwaretestingo Editorial Board

I love open-source technologies and am very passionate about software development. I like to share my knowledge with others, especially on technology that's why I have given all the examples as simple as possible to understand for beginners. All the code posted on my blog is developed, compiled, and tested in my development environment. If you find any mistakes or bugs, Please drop an email to softwaretestingo.com@gmail.com, or You can join me on Linkedin.

Leave a Comment