Pulling a Branch from GitHub

Now continue working on our new branch in our local Git.

Lets pull from our GitHub repository again so that our code is up-to-date:

git pull
remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 851 bytes | 9.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/w3schools-test/hello-world
 * [new branch]      html-skeleton -> origin/html-skeleton
Already up to date.

Now our main branch is up todate. And we can see that there is a new branch available on GitHub.

Do a quick status check:

git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

And confirm which branches we have, and where we are working at the moment:

git branch
* master

So, we do not have the new branch on our local Git. But we know it is available on GitHub. So we can use the -a option to see all local and remote branches:

git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/html-skeleton
  remotes/origin/master

We see that the branch html-skeleton is available remotely, but not on our local git. Lets check it out:

git checkout html-skeleton
Switched to a new branch 'html-skeleton'
Branch 'html-skeleton' set up to track remote branch 'html-skeleton' from 'origin'.

And check if it is all up to date:

git pull
Already up to date.

Which branches do we have now, and where are we working from?

git branch
* html-skeleton
  master

Now, open your favourite editor and confirm that the changes from the GitHub branch carried over.

That is how you pull a GitHub branch to your local Git.