Git – Download a specific tag with Git

First, clone a remote Git repository and cd into it:

$ git clone git://example.com/myproject
$ cd myproject

Next, look at the local branches in your repository:

$ git branch
* master

But there are other branches hiding in your repository! You can see these using the -a flag:

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
  remotes/origin/experimental

If you just want to take a quick peek at an upstream branch, you can check it out directly:

$ git checkout origin/experimental

But if you want to work on that branch, you'll need to create a local tracking branch which is done automatically by:

$ git checkout experimental

and you will see

Branch experimental set up to track remote branch experimental from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'experimental'

Here, "new branch" simply means that the branch is taken from the index and created locally for you. As the previous line tells you, the branch is being set up to track the remote branch, which usually means the origin/branch_name branch.

Now, if you look at your local branches, this is what you'll see:

$ git branch
* experimental
  master

You can actually track more than one remote repository using git remote.

$ git remote add win32 git://example.com/users/joe/myproject-win32-port
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
  remotes/origin/experimental
  remotes/win32/master
  remotes/win32/new-widgets

At this point, things are getting pretty crazy, so run gitk to see what's going on:

$ gitk --all &

In the simplest terms, git pull does a git fetch followed by a git merge.

You can do a git fetch at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/. This operation never changes any of your own local branches under refs/heads, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. I have even heard of people running git fetch periodically in a cron job in the background (although I wouldn't recommend doing this).

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.

From the Git documentation for git pull:

In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.