How do I configure Git to automatically pull from current branch when using "git pull"?

Question

With our current setup you always have to enter the branch name (ie: git pull origin feature-branch" when doing a pull. I've already made the mistake of pulling from one branch into another, accidentally merging two branches with two very different releases. I'd like to avoid this by configuring Git so that simply typing git pull will pull the current branch you're in.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

I am, too, a fan of typing just git pull and getting all the magic.

You have 2 options:

1) git config --global branch.autoSetupMerge always

This will ensure that whether you checkout a remote branch, or create a new one; the tracking information will be handled automatically by git. Then you will be able to

git clone <some_repo>
git checkout -b <new_branch>
git push
git pull

Note that in order to push without more keywords, you need to set the push option as well. I have set it to matching, but everyone has their preference on that. (git config --global push.default matching)

More info: autosetupmerge defaults to true. When set to true, this lets git to perform tracking when you checkout an already existing branch at the remote. For example, if you do git checkout <branch>, git will handle the tracking info so that you can do git pull while on that branch. However, it will not perform this on branches that you create with -b option. Setting autosetupmerge to always ensures that git handles tracking info all the time.

2) When checking out a new branch, you need to specifically set the branch to pull from origin (aka tracking)

git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

I find this less useful when the branches are transient. If you rarely create a new branch, you should go with this. However, if you are like me, where only the master branch is persistent and every feature has its own brand new branch, then I find option 1 more useful.

Note that, you do not need to make git configuration --global. You may simply write --local there, and have that setting specific to that repository only.