Checkout branch on different remote

Question

I have a repo that has another remote upstream besides origin. I can do git checkout origin/master, but when I run git checkout upstream/master, I get:

error: pathspec 'upstream/master' did not match any file(s) known to git.

This does not work either:

$ git fetch upstream
From https://github.com/getsentry/sentry
 * branch            HEAD       -> FETCH_HEAD
$ git co -b asdf --track upstream/master
fatal: Cannot update paths and switch to branch 'asdf' at the same time.
Did you intend to checkout 'upstream/master' which can not be resolved as commit?

How to check out branches on upstream remote as I do on origin remote? My git version is 2.1.2.

Answer 1

Just fetch the refs from the remote (this will fetch all branch, commit, refs etc for the upstream repo)

git fetch upstream

After this, checkout the needed branch (this creates a local copy of the branch)

git checkout -b <branchname> --track upstream/<branchname>

Now if you want to pull the changes in this branch in future, all you need to do is

git pull upstream <branchname>

---

As mentioned here, try doing an explicit fetch on the branch name:

git fetch upstream master:branch_name

Answer 2

If you just added the remote, you'll need to fetch it so that Git knows which branches are available:

git fetch upstream master

After this you can do

git checkout upstream/master

without any issues.

Answer 3

Please follow the below steps,

Step 01: add new remote using below add command

git remote add testRemote https://repourl.git

Step 02: set the url as remote

git remote set-url testRemote https://repourl.git

Step 03: to pull the branches from new repo

git pull

Step 04: switch to new branch

git checkout branchFromNewremote

Then you can create new branch from the current branch

Answer 4

In more concise way (I'm using git 2.28), you can say

git fetch upstream

and then

git checkout -b <branch_name> --guess

where the --guess flag checks if a branch corresponding to <branch_name> exists on any of the remotes and tracks the corresponding remote (docs here).