Git – How to change the remote a branch is tracking

git

The central repository had to be set up on a new server, so I created a new remote on my local repo, and pushed to that.

But now when I do git pull, it claims I am up to date. It's wrong—it's telling me about the old remote branch, not the new one, which I know for a fact has new commits to fetch.

How do I change my local branch to track a different remote?

I can see this in the git config file but I don't want to mess things up.

[branch "master"]
    remote = oldserver
    merge = refs/heads/master

Best Answer

Using git v1.8.0 or later:

git branch branch_name --set-upstream-to your_new_remote/branch_name

Or you can use the `-u` switch

git branch branch_name -u your_new_remote/branch_name

Using git v1.7.12 or earlier

git branch --set-upstream branch_name your_new_remote/branch_name

Related Solutions

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

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.

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

You can undo git add before commit with

git reset <file>

which will remove it from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.

You can use

git reset

without any file name to unstage all due changes. This can come in handy when there are too many files to be listed one by one in a reasonable amount of time.

In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:

"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

Documentation: git reset