How to track all remote Git branches as local branches?

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.

Most of the answers here are over complicating the parsing of the output of git branch -r. You can use the following for loop to create the tracking branches against all the branches on the remote like so.

Example

Say I have these remote branches.

$ git branch -r origin/HEAD -> origin/master origin/development origin/integration origin/master origin/production origin/staging 

Confirm that we're not tracking anything other than master already, locally:

$ git branch -l # or using just git branch * master 

You can use this one liner to create the tracking branches:

$ for i in $(git branch -r | grep -vE "HEAD|master"); do git branch --track ${i#*/} $i; done Branch development set up to track remote branch development from origin. Branch integration set up to track remote branch integration from origin. Branch production set up to track remote branch production from origin. Branch staging set up to track remote branch staging from origin. 

Now confirm:

$ git branch development integration * master production staging 

To delete them:

$ git br -D production development integration staging Deleted branch production (was xxxxx). Deleted branch development (was xxxxx). Deleted branch integration (was xxxxx). Deleted branch staging (was xxxxx). 

If you use the -vv switch to git branch you can confirm:

$ git br -vv development xxxxx [origin/development] commit log msg .... integration xxxxx [origin/integration] commit log msg .... * master xxxxx [origin/master] commit log msg .... production xxxxx [origin/production] commit log msg .... staging xxxxx [origin/staging] commit log msg .... 

Breakdown of for loop

The loop basically calls the command git branch -r, filtering out any HEAD or master branches in the output using grep -vE "HEAD|master". To get the names of just the branches minus the origin/ substring we use Bash's string manipulation ${var#stringtoremove}. This will remove the string, "stringtoremove" from the variable $var. In our case we're removing the string origin/ from the variable $i.

NOTE: Alternatively you can use git checkout --track ... to do this as well:

$ for i in $(git branch -r | grep -vE "HEAD|master" | sed 's/^[ ]\+//'); do git checkout --track $i; done 

But I don't particularly care for this method, since it's switching you among the branches as it performs a checkout. When done it'll leave you on the last branch that it created.

References

• 10.1. Manipulating Strings - Advanced Bash Scripting Guide
• 3.5 Git Branching - Remote Branches

Update Q1 2020: Mohsen Abasi proposes in the comments, based on the 2014 slm's answer, the simpler alternative:

for i in $(git branch -r | grep -vE "HEAD|master" | sed 's/^[ ]\+//'); do git switch --track $i; done 

And it uses $() instead of obsolete backticks.

As I mention in another old answer, using git for-each-ref is probably faster.
And I would use the new (Git 2.23+) git switch command, which replaces the confusing git checkout.

for i in $(git for-each-ref --format=%(refname:short) \ --no-merged=origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin); do \ git switch --track $i; \ done 

That way, no grep needed.

Old (2011) original answer:

Here is my one-liner I use (in a bash shell, tested with msysgit1.7.4):

For copy-paste:

remote=origin ; for brname in `git branch -r | grep $remote | grep -v master | grep -v HEAD | awk '{gsub(/^[^\/]+\//,"",$1); print $1}'`; do git branch --set-upstream-to $remote/$brname $brname; done 

For more readability:

remote=origin ; // put here the name of the remote you want for brname in ` git branch -r | grep $remote | grep -v master | grep -v HEAD | awk '{gsub(/^[^\/]+\//,"",$1); print $1}' `; do git branch --set-upstream-to $remote/$brname $brname; done 

• it will only select upstream branches from the remote you specify in the remote variable (it can be 'origin' or whatever name you have set for one of the remotes of your current Git repo).

• it will extract the name of the branch: origin/a/Branch/Name => a/Branch/Name through the awk expression.

• it will set the upstream branch through --set-upstream-to (or -u), not --track:
  The advantage is that, if the branch already exists, it won't fail and it won't change that branch origin, it will only configure the branch.xxx.(remote|merge) setting.

   branch.aBranchName.remote=origin branch.aBranchName.merge=refs/heads/a/Branch/Name 

That command will create local branches for all remote upstream branches, and set their remote and merge setting to that remote branch.

Without any scripting (in an empty directory):

$ git clone --bare repo_url .git $ git config core.bare false $ git checkout 

After that, all remote branches will be seen as local.

Original (in Russian).

You could script that easily enough, but I don't know when it'd be valuable. Those branches would pretty quickly fall behind, and you'd have to update them all the time.

The remote branches are automatically going to be kept up to date, so it's easiest just to create the local branch at the point where you actually want to work on it.

for i in `git branch -a | grep remote`; do git branch --track ${i#remotes/origin/} $i; done 

If you want to use powershell and your remote is called origin. Then this works.

git fetch git branch -r | %{$_ -replace " origin/"} | %{git branch --track $_ "origin/$_"} 

From Git 2.23 onwards:

for branch in `git branch -r | grep origin/`; do git switch -t -C ${branch#origin/} $branch; git pull; done 

The -C flag for git switch creates or resets if it already exists.

Git switch documentation

for branch in `git branch -a | grep remotes | grep -v HEAD | grep -v master`; do git branch --track ${branch##*/} $branch; done 

Use this and you will not have such warning as: refname 'origin/dev' is ambiguous

To do the same as tjmcewan's answer but on Windows, call this from a batch file:

for /f "delims=" %%r in ('git branch -r ^| grep -v master') do git checkout --track %%r 

Or this from the command line:

for /f "delims=" %r in ('git branch -r ^| grep -v master') do git checkout --track %r 

Here is my solution of a Bash command referred to by @tjmcewan:

for remote in `git branch -r | grep -v /HEAD `; do git branch --track ${remote/"origin/"/""}; done 

My goal is to solve the problem that all the created branches will have "origin/" as the start of the name, because I tested that $remote variables are still include "origin/":

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

VonC's solution can be simplified even further by changing the sed (I lack the rep points to comment directly on his post):

for branch in $(git branch -r | sed 's,[^/]*/,,g'); do git switch $branch; done 

By replacing everything that isn't a slash up to the final slash, the remaining branch name is suitable for local use; repeatedly switching to the same branch isn't an error (it may be inefficient, but it may be more efficient than having a grep in the pipe :->).

The switch command is smart enough to track each remote branch as necessary.

Using Bash, if you want to checkout all branches:

for remote in `git branch -r`; do git checkout $(echo $remote | cut -d'/' -f 2); done 

It’s important to note that when you do a fetch that brings down new remote-tracking branches, you don’t automatically have local, editable copies of them.

Use:

for rembranch in `git remote update 2>&1 > /dev/null ; git branch -r|egrep -wv "HEAD|master"` do git checkout --track -b `echo $rembranch|awk -F\/ '{print $2}'` $rembranch; done 

Explanation:

Line 1: 'git branch -r' (followed by 'git remote update' to update the info on changes to remote) lists all remote branches; 'egrep -vw' is used to knock entries having HEAD and master in the result.

Line 3: Track the named remote branch while checking it out locally. A simple AWK is used to avoid 'origin/' being the suffix for local branches.

Use:

#!/usr/bin/env bash # Go from a shallow clone of the main branch # to a deep clone of all branches # Excluding mounted worktrees is required to avoid errors like: # fatal: refusing to fetch into branch 'refs/heads/master' checked out at '/tmp/repo' remote=${1:-origin} git fetch $remote --depth=99999999 $( git ls-remote --heads $remote | cut -d/ -f3- | grep -v -x -E $( git worktree list --porcelain | grep ^branch | cut -c19- | tr $'\n' '|' ) | sed 's/.*/&:&/' ) 

This will expand to something like:

git fetch origin --depth=99999999 \ branch1:branch1 \ branch2:branch2 \ branch2:branch3 

In case you already have some branches checked out and want to

• check out all remaining branches from the remote
• make sure all local branches track the remote branches

you can use the following Bash- and Z shell-compatible script:

git branch -r | while read b; do if git branch | grep -q " ${b##*/}$"; then git branch --set-upstream ${b##*/} $b; else git branch --track ${b##*/} $b; fi; done