Question

A colleague pushed a new remote branch to origin/dev/homepage and I cannot see it when I run:

$ git branch -r

I still see preexisting remote branches.

I assume this is because my local remote refs are not up-to-date hence when I ran a git pull nothing happened since git pull only pulls on the current working branch correct? Unlike git push which pushes all branches that have changes to the corresponding remote branch?

Answer 1

First, double check that the branch has been actually pushed remotely, by using the command git ls-remote origin. If the new branch appears in the output, try and give the command git fetch: it should download the branch references from the remote repository.

If your remote branch still does not appear, double check (in the ls-remote output) what is the branch name on the remote and, specifically, if it begins with refs/heads/. This is because, by default, the value of remote.<name>.fetch is:

+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

so that only the remote references whose name starts with refs/heads/ will be mapped locally as remote-tracking references under refs/remotes/origin/ (i.e., they will become remote-tracking branches)