Git Fetch

When you want to see what your colleagues have been working on and to examine their work, one of the commands that allow you to do that is git fetch. This command will download all commits, files from the remote repository in our local repo, but the important part here is that it will not update your local repository files leaving your current work intact.

Another command that lets you download changes from remote is git pull we will talk about this command in the next section, but what you have to remember is that git fetch is a safe option, because as stated above once this command finishes its work it will leave you local working directory intact. If you asking yourself how git accomplishes this we will have to dive a little bit deeper and see what is happening behind the scene. Don't worry it is not complicated at all, it is all about how git stores commits. If you remember from Git commit section git stores all commits inside .git/objects directory, but it keeps local and remote branch commits separated using branch refs and by keeping those refs inside different directories. Local branch refs are kept inside .git/refs/heads and remote branch refs inside .git/refs/remotes directories.

$ git fetch <remote> - command for downloading all data from <remote>, if not specified git it will consider origin as a default remote.

$ git fetch <remote> <branch> - command for downloading data from specific remote branch.

$ git fetch --all - command for downloading data from all remotes that you have configured for your project repository.