Git: automatic fetching from remote repositories?

git git-merge git-status
Steve Bennett picture Steve Bennett · May 5, 2012 · Viewed 10.5k times · Source

One irritating thing I find about using command line Git is having to manually sync my repository with remote repositories. I constantly get tripped up by commands like "git status" that I (mistakenly) expect to report the difference between my working directory and a repository on GitHub. (Of course it reports the difference between my working directory and my local repository...)

Is there any way to get automatic/implicit fetching, so that remotes are always up to date? I would happily pay a penalty of a few seconds for commands like git status, git merge etc.

Answer

joshp picture joshp · May 5, 2012

One of those commands is already built in.

git pull

does a fetch and a merge.

For the other one, well....define your own command, such as 

alias gitfu='git fetch; git status'

The shell is yours to command.

Depending on your configuration you may be asked for pass phrase or credentials for each of these.

Related questions

How to resolve git status "Unmerged paths:"?

I merged branch dog into animal. When I go to commit, I get the following: Unmerged paths: (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage) (use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution both deleted: ../public/images/originals/…

Read More
How to resolve merge conflicts in Git repository?

I want to resolve merge conflicts in my Git repository. How to do that ?

Read More
Undo a Git merge that hasn't been pushed yet

Within my master branch, I did a git merge some-other-branch locally, but never pushed the changes to origin master. I didn't mean to merge, so I'd like to undo it. When doing a git status after my merge, I was …

Read More