Difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

Which one do you use? ‘pull’ or ‘fetch’?

To be honest, I used to just ignore ‘fetch’ and didn’t even know what it is and ‘pull’ all the time, but then I thought let’s see what the hell is this ‘fetch’ thing.

Simply put, git pull is a git fetch followed by a git merge.

When do you use ‘git fetch’?

‘fetch’ can be useful, when you want to get the stuff from a remote branch, but don’t want to merge it to your local branch!

You can do a git fetch at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/.

This command does not change any of your own local branches under refs/heads, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. Every now and then I I have seen people running git fetch periodically in a cron job in the background, though it sounds something that might make you really confused!

When do you use ‘git pull’?

A git pull is what you would do to bring a local branch up-to-date with its remote version, while also updating your other remote-tracking branches.

In other words: git pull will always merge into the current branch. So you select which branch you want to pull from, and it pulls it into the current branch. The from branch can be local or remote; it can even be a remote branch that’s not a registered git remote (meaning you pass a URL on the git pull command line).

Can I do ‘git fetch’ and ‘git merge’ instead of ‘git pull’ then?

No. I mean not in all possible circumstances, though it can be emulated by a fetch and a merge.

I quote from one of the folk’s comments on reddit:

‘git pull’ can be emulated by a fetch and a merge. You just have to know which remote-tracking branch your local branch is tracking and then merge that specific branch into the local branch.

lol, yeah welcome to the GIT club!

pull can’t actually be emulated by a fetch plus a merge. When you just fetch a change, only a remote branch pointer changes, and merge would refuse to do anything.

On the other hand pull, fast-forwards your tracking branch, so there is a actually a difference!

So, as an alternative to ‘git pull’, you can do a ‘git fetch’ followed by ‘git rebase origin/master’

Cheers!