Git - Automatically fast forward all tracking branches on pull

Chetan picture Chetan · Jan 2, 2011 · Viewed 13.4k times · Source

I've set up tracking branches with the --track option, and when I do a git pull on master, it fetches all branches to origin/branchname but doesn't merge with the local tracking branches. This is extra annoying, because if I later do a git push on master, it says that non-fast-forward updates were rejected on the tracking branches, since they weren't fast-forwarded on the initial git pull.

My question is: How do I make it so that git pull with fetch all branches and automatically fast-forward all the tracking branches?

Note: git pull used to fast-forward all my tracking branches with my GitHub repos, but now that I've set up my own repos using Gitolite, this problem is cropping up.

Answer

qwertzguy picture qwertzguy · Jun 27, 2014

Shell script that fast-forwards all branches that have their upstream branch set to the matching origin/ branch without doing any checkouts

  • it doesn't change your current branch at any time, no need to deal with working copy changes and time lost checking out

  • it only does fast-forwards, branches that cannot be fast-forwarded will show an error message and will be skipped

Make sure all your branches' upstream branches are set correctly by running git branch -vv. Set the upstream branch with git branch -u origin/yourbanchname

Copy-paste into a file and chmod 755:

#!/bin/sh

curbranch=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)

for branch in $(git for-each-ref refs/heads --format="%(refname:short)"); do
        upbranch=$(git config --get branch.$branch.merge | sed 's:refs/heads/::');
        if [ "$branch" = "$upbranch" ]; then
                if [ "$branch" = "$curbranch" ]; then
                        echo Fast forwarding current branch $curbranch
                        git merge --ff-only origin/$upbranch
                else
                        echo Fast forwarding $branch with origin/$upbranch
                        git fetch . origin/$upbranch:$branch
                fi
        fi
done;