How to 'git pull' into a branch that is not the current one?

git branch git-branch
Malvineous picture Malvineous · Sep 25, 2013 · Viewed 79.1k times · Source

When you run git pull on the master branch, it typically pulls from origin/master. I am in a different branch called newbranch, but I need to run a command that does a git pull from origin/master into master but I cannot run git checkout to change the selected branch until after the pull is complete. Is there a way to do this?

To give some background, the repository stores a website. I have made some changes in newbranch and deployed them by switching the website to newbranch. Now those changes have been merged upstream into the master branch, I am trying to switch the website back to the master branch as well. At this point, newbranch and origin/master are identical, but master is lagging behind origin/master and needs to be updated. The problem is, if I do it the traditional way:

$ git checkout master
   # Uh oh, production website has now reverted back to old version in master
$ git pull
   # Website is now up to date again

I need to achieve the same as above (git checkout master && git pull), but without changing the working directory to an earlier revision during the process.

Answer

Martin Peter picture Martin Peter · Mar 20, 2017

Straightforward: Updating from a remote branch into a currently not checked-out branch master:

git fetch origin master:master

where origin is your remote and you are currently checked out in some branch e.g. dev.

If you want to update your current branch in addition to the specified branch at one go:

git pull origin master:master

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