How to download a branch with git?

I have a project hosted on GitHub. I created a branch on one computer, then pushed my changes to github with

git push origin branch-name

Now I am on a different computer, and I want to download that branch. So I tried:

git pull origin branch-name

...but all this did was overwrite my master branch with the changes in my new branch.

What do I need to do to properly pull my remote branch?


Thanks to a related question, I found out that that I need to "checkout" the remote branch as a new local branch, and specify a new local branch name.

git checkout -b newlocalbranchname origin/branch-name

Or you can do:

git checkout -t origin/branch-name

The latter will create a branch that is also set to track the remote branch.


Update: It's been 5 years since I originally posted this question. I've learned a lot and git has improved since then. My usual workflow is a little different now.

If I want to fetch the remote branches, I simply run:

git pull

This will fetch all of the remote branches and merge the current branch. It will display an output that looks something like this:

From github.com:andrewhavens/example-project
   dbd07ad..4316d29  master     -> origin/master
 * [new branch]      production -> origin/production
 * [new branch]      my-bugfix-branch -> origin/my-bugfix-branch
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Fast-forwarded master to 4316d296c55ac2e13992a22161fc327944bcf5b8.

Now git knows about my new my-bugfix-branch . To switch to this branch, I can simply run:

git checkout my-bugfix-branch

Normally, I would need to create the branch before I could check it out, but in newer versions of git, it's smart enough to know that you want to checkout a local copy of this remote branch.


For any Git newbies like me, here are some steps you could follow to download a remote repository, and then switch to the branch that you want to view. They probably abuse Git in some way, but it did the job for me! :-)

Clone the repository you want to download the code for (in this example I've picked the LRResty project on Github):

$ git clone https://github.com/lukeredpath/LRResty.git
$ cd LRResty

Check what branch you are using at this point (it should be the master branch):

$ git branch    
* master

Check out the branch you want, in my case it is called 'arcified':

 $ git checkout -b arcified origin/arcified
 Branch arcified set up to track remote branch arcified from origin.
 Switched to a new branch 'arcified'

Confirm you are now using the branch you wanted:

$ git branch    
* arcified
  master

If you want to update the code again later, run git pull :

$ git pull
Already up-to-date.

You could use git remote like:

git fetch origin

and then setup a local branch to track the remote branch like below:

git branch --track [local-branch-name] origin/remote-branch-name

You would now have the contents of the remote github branch in local-branch-name.

You could switch to that local-branch-name and start work:

git checkout [local-branch-name]
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