Pulling Commits

• Remember that a local tracking branch is one that's associated with a remote branch.
• There's an advantage to establishing this association. It lets you use the git pull command when that tracking branch is checked out.
• The git pull command is like running git fetch followed by git merge. It lets you retrieve remote changes and incorporate them into your local tracking branch with a single command.
• With git pull, you don't have to specify which remote you want to fetch from, or which remote branch you want to merge in, because all of that info is stored by the tracking branch. Your tracking branch will always fetch from the same remote repo, and merge in the same remote branch.
• You just type git pull, and hit Enter. Git will do the rest: git pull
  • Right now, there are no commits in the remote repo's add-letters branch to pull over, so it says we're "Already up to date."

$ git pull
Already up to date.

• Let's go back to the remote repo and add a commit: cd ../decoder
• And I'll check out the add-letters branch: git checkout add-letters
• I'll add another conversion to the decoder.rb file:

  11 => 'K',

• I'll stage it: git add decoder.rb
• And commit it: git commit -m 'Add K conversion'
• Now let's go back to our local repo: cd ../decoder-local
• And run git pull again: git pull
  • The output looks just like what you'd see if you did a git fetch origin followed by a git merge origin/add-letters.

$ git pull
remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From /Users/jay/th/decoder
   af94e11..09d6fcb  add-letters -> origin/add-letters
Updating af94e11..09d6fcb
Fast-forward
 decoder.rb | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)