Adding a Tracking Branch

Goals

• Learn how to add a local branch that tracks a remote branch.

The branches starting with remotes/origin are branches from the original repo. Notice that you don’t have a branch called greet anymore, but it knows that the original repo had a greet branch.

Add a local branch that tracks a remote branch.

Execute:

git branch --track greet origin/greet
git branch -a
git hist --max-count=2

Output:

$ git branch --track greet origin/greet
Branch 'greet' set up to track remote branch 'greet' from 'origin'.
$ git branch -a
  greet
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/greet
  remotes/origin/master
$ git hist --max-count=2
* b39ac69 2020-06-20 | Changed README in original repo (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) [Jim Weirich]
* e0cc19e 2020-06-20 | Updated Rakefile (origin/greet, greet) [Jim Weirich]

We can now see the greet branch in the branch list and in the log.