Fetch a specific branch using git

Question

I want to download source code from the master-next branch using git as described in the Xilinx wiki.

I tried this:

#git clone git://github.com/Xilinx/u-boot-xlnx/tree/master-next.git

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/Hannan/master-next/.git/
fatal: remote error:
Xilinx/u-boot-xlnx/tree/master-next is not a valid repository name
Email [email protected] for help

Even this failed:

# git clone git://github.com/Xilinx/tree/master-next/u-boot-xlnx.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/Hannan/u-boot-xlnx/.git/
fatal: remote error:
Xilinx/tree/master-next/u-boot-xlnx is not a valid repository name
Email [email protected] for help

The command that works is:

 git clone git://github.com/Xilinx/u-boot-xlnx.git

But how do I know that this will indeed fetch the master-next branch and not the master branch? How do I correctly fetch a specific branch using git?

I am using RHEL 6, accessed via PuTTY.

Answer 1

Like the error message tells you, git clone expects a git repository. You can't "add" the name of a branch in the path like that. See branches in git.

You can clone a single branch (and it's history) : git clone <url> --branch <branch> --single-branch

See git help clone.

But the clone command you ran gave you a copy of the whole repository, you can see the existing branches with git branch and more details about them with git show-branch.

Switch to the branch you want with git checkout branch-name.

The first chapters of the Pro Git book (available online) give more details on the basic commands.

Answer 2

This command should work:

$ git fetch origin [branch]

The above command only fetches metadata from remote repository, it doesn't merge sources.

If you want fetch and merge the sources it should be:

$ git pull origin [branch]

Be careful with the branch where you are executing merge command. That branch will be where the sources are merged.

#UPDATE# grammatical checking/re-writing

Answer 3

git repositories contain all branches (but compressed and only differences hence rarely a size issue).

Therefore, you can clone the entire project as you have done successfully. This is a standard way to get a repository, even if you are only interest in one branch.

The .git structure will then include all the branches done on that repository.

To use a specific branch do git checkout [branch_name] If the branch exists the files will be made available locally (as just that, the current files in the project directories).

git status will then show which branch is the current branch, for example:

According to Leiaz one can clone a specific branch. In practice I've never done this or seen others use it. On further research, I see it is relatively new, added in git 1.7.10 (April 2012): 'git clone learned --single-branch' option to limit cloning to a single branch (surprise!); tags that do not point into the history of the branch are not fetched. For example:

git clone -b master-next --single-branch git://github.com/Xilinx/

Here, for my "linker" application I am checking out branch v3.0.10