What are the differences between git pull and git fetch?
Answer:
In the simplest terms, git pull
does a git fetch
followed by a git merge
.
You can do a git fetch
at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/
. This operation never changes any of your own local branches under refs/heads
, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. I have even heard of people running git fetch
periodically in a cron job in the background (although I wouldn’t recommend doing this).
A git pull
is what you would do to bring a local branch up-to-date with its remote version, while also updating your other remote-tracking branches.
Git documentation: git pull