Question

I have a Git repo on BitBucket. I have two branches master and db. On my laptop I made changes to db, commited the changes and pushed up to BitBucket. I can see the commit in that branch.

Now I’m at my desktop at work and I’ve done a git pull whilst on branch master. It’s pulled down master’s commits but not db, which I guess might be the way it should work. I want to get the latest commits on db so I switch to that branch and do git pull however I get the following message:

You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you want to merge
with…

I’m not really sure why this is happening. I created that branch on this machine so should it not just pull down the commits into that branch?

OUTOUT FROM git branch -vva

$ git branch -vva
  analytics             cea39b9 updated analytics code
* db                    6091b29 minor change to the tag creation code
  master                0a4070c [origin/master] Merge branch 'master' of https:/
/bitbucket.org/billyjones/findr.fm
  remotes/origin/db     faf9970 Got tracks working. Now trying to cache prices.
  remotes/origin/master 0a4070c Merge branch 'master' of https://bitbucket.org/b
illyjones/findr.fm

It’s the faf9970 commit I need to pull

Answer 1

If your desktop has not yet a local db branch, you first have to create it:

git branch db origin/db

It might be necessary to perform a git fetch -a before that.

If the local db branch already exists make sure that it tracks the corresponding remote branch.

You can verify that via git remote show origin. Under the heading “Local branches configured for ‘git pull’:” it should show “db merges with remote db”. If that’s not the case execute this command if you are on git 1.8:

git branch -u origin/db db

If you are on an older version of git, use this command:

git branch --set-upstream db origin/db