Track all remote git branches as local branches

git branch
Janson picture Janson · Dec 18, 2008 · Viewed 79.1k times · Source

Tracking a single remote branch as a local branch is straightforward enough. 

$ git checkout --track -b ${branch_name} origin/${branch_name}

Pushing all local branches up to the remote, creating new remote branches as needed is also easy.

$ git push --all origin

I want to do the reverse. If I have X number of remote branches at a single source: 

$ git branch -r 
branch1
branch2
branch3
.
.
.

Can I create local tracking branches for all those remote branches without needed to manually create each one? Say something like:

$ git checkout --track -b --all origin

I've googled and RTMs, but have come up bunk thus far.

Answer

tjmcewan picture tjmcewan · Jun 23, 2010

The answer given by Otto is good, but all the created branches will have "origin/" as the start of the name. If you just want the last part (after the last /) to be your resulting branch names, use this:

for remote in `git branch -r | grep -v /HEAD`; do git checkout --track $remote ; done

It also has the benefit of not giving you any warnings about ambiguous refs.

Related questions

Git fetch remote branch

My colleague and I are working on the same repository. We've branched it into two branches, each technically for different projects, but they have similarities, so we'll sometimes want to commit back to the *master from the branch. However, I …

Read More
How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

How do you delete untracked local files from your current working tree?

Read More
How do you create a remote Git branch?

I created a local branch which I want to 'push' upstream. There is a similar question here on Stack Overflow on how to track a newly created remote branch. However, my workflow is slightly different. First I want to create …

Read More