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Development Tools Git Branches and Merging Remote Branches Remote Branches

Jonathan Grieve
MOD
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points
Posted by Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

Difference between git fetch and git pull

I'll be honest, working as an individual I don't tend to use GitHub as a collaborator. I use it as a way of saving and backing up my projects. When I'm getting my projects up to date, I git clone URLS if I need to or I use git pull.

In this video we use git fetch. What's the difference between the 2 and if I used git fetch in the same way, would it work?

I think I've understood the process of using merge and fetch though and I'm keen to solidify these so I can learn to contribute and collaborate in the future.

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,268 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,268 Points

As I understand it, git fetch is a basic download while git pull also incorporates the download into code you may be working on. So git pull would essentially be a combination of git fetch followed by git merge.

I also found a short (under 4 minutes) YouTube Video on this topic that you might like.

Good seeing you online again. Happy coding!

Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points
Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

So it sounds like using git pull is something you'd only use if you were absolutely sure you wanted to do in case it introduced something into your local repo that you didn't want in there. But git fetch wouldn't do that? In any case, I've never really had a problem using git pull but maybe that's just cos of the way I use git.

I haven't been away really. Not really, things just been a bit chaotic behind the scenes :)

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,268 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,268 Points

I can certainly relate to chaos. Plus we don't have the immediate connection channel we used to.