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This article will discuss the practical uses of the git pulland git fetchcommands to understand how they differ and when to use each.

What is Git Fetch

In our remote repository we have files like below.

Notice that our remote and local repositories are in sync. Let's change Sample.txta file in the remote repository.

Write something random in the file and commit the changes.

At this point, our remote repository has two commits, and our local repository has one commit. This means our local repository needs to be updated.

At this point, git fetchit's handy. Let's run a git logcommand to check our commit history in our local repository.

Our local repository has no Updated Sample.txtcommits. We git fetchcheck in changes using .

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git/Delftscopetech (main)
$ git fetch
remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 709 bytes | 2.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/Wachira11ke/Delftscopetech
   c43169e..2445daf  main       -> origin/main

From the above command, we can see the changes made to the master branch in the remote repository. We can git mergeapply these changes to our local repository using the command.

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git/Delftscopetech (main)
$ git merge origin main
Updating c43169e..2445daf
Fast-forward
 Sample.txt | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Let's run git logthe command to check our commit history.

$ git log
commit 2445dafc118748a5cb53c5262b393ab0e1a9e235 (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD)
Author: Wachira11ke <100116527+Wachira11ke@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 15 22:07:11 2022 +0300
    Update Sample.txt
    First Update
commit c43169e587ab7ab996087ff460e54032e83030f0
Author: Wachira11ke <100116527+Wachira11ke@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 15 21:45:50 2022 +0300
    Second commit
commit b2f77108396c9ae867d8e9d69c575eda99dd1436
Author: Wachira11ke <100116527+Wachira11ke@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Mon Feb 21 10:00:23 2022 +0300
    Initial commit

At this point, our local and remote repositories are in sync. Let's look at git pullthe commands.

What is Git pull

Let's go back to our remote repository and make some more changes to our files. Write a random number and commit the changes.

Now, our remote repository has one more commit than our local repository. We can run git pullthe command to update our local repository.

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git/Delftscopetech (main)
$ git pull origin main
remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 730 bytes | 3.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/Wachira11ke/Delftscopetech
 * branch            main       -> FETCH_HEAD
   2445daf..8089f2b  main       -> origin/main
Updating 2445daf..8089f2b
Fast-forward
 Sample.txt | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Our local repository is now in sync with our remote repository. We can conclude that git pullit is a compound command ( git fetch+ git merge).

It fetches and merges the changes directly.

Differences between Git Fetch and Git Pull