Cloning Remote Branches With Git

After cloning locally a remote git project with multiple branches, you will only get the default project branch, typically master. At this point executing git branch will show you the locally available branches in your repository:

$ git branch
* master

However if you add the -a option to git branch you’ll get a list, which also includes all the available remote brances, like this:

$ git branch -a
* master
 origin/HEAD
 origin/master
 origin/source
 origin/foobar

Using this list as a reference, we can now create a local tracking branch to work on, for example:

git checkout -b source origin/source

The source branch will now be checked out and available locally, which we can see by running git branch once again:

$ git branch
master
* source

That’s it! There’s also the git pull --all command which will fetch all the remote branches that have been tracked locally, however it will not create local tracking branches. There is no git native way of automatically creating local tacking branches of all remotes and this is perhaps not a good idea anyway, as they can get stale rather quick.