GIT-FETCH(1) Git Manual GIT-FETCH(1)

NAME

git-fetch - Download objects and refs from another repository

SYNOPSIS

git fetch [<options>] [<repository> [<refspec>...]]
git fetch [<options>] <group>
git fetch --multiple [<options>] [(<repository> | <group>)...]
git fetch --all [<options>]

DESCRIPTION

Fetch branches and/or tags (collectively, "refs") from one or more
other repositories, along with the objects necessary to complete
their histories. Remote-tracking branches are updated (see the
description of <refspec> below for ways to control this behavior).

By default, any tag that points into the histories being fetched is
also fetched; the effect is to fetch tags that point at branches that
you are interested in. This default behavior can be changed by using
the --tags or --no-tags options or by configuring
remote.<name>.tagOpt. By using a refspec that fetches tags
explicitly, you can fetch tags that do not point into branches you
are interested in as well.

git fetch can fetch from either a single named repository or URL, or
from several repositories at once if <group> is given and there is a
remotes.<group> entry in the configuration file. (See git-config(1)).

When no remote is specified, by default the origin remote will be
used, unless there's an upstream branch configured for the current
branch.

The names of refs that are fetched, together with the object names
they point at, are written to .git/FETCH_HEAD. This information may
be used by scripts or other git commands, such as git-pull(1).

OPTIONS

--[no-]all
Fetch all remotes, except for the ones that has the
remote.<name>.skipFetchAll configuration variable set. This
overrides the configuration variable fetch.all`.

-a, --append
Append ref names and object names of fetched refs to the existing
contents of .git/FETCH_HEAD. Without this option old data in
.git/FETCH_HEAD will be overwritten.

--atomic
Use an atomic transaction to update local refs. Either all refs
are updated, or on error, no refs are updated.

--depth=<depth>
Limit fetching to the specified number of commits from the tip of
each remote branch history. If fetching to a shallow repository
created by git clone with --depth=<depth> option (see git-
clone(1)), deepen or shorten the history to the specified number
of commits. Tags for the deepened commits are not fetched.

--deepen=<depth>
Similar to --depth, except it specifies the number of commits
from the current shallow boundary instead of from the tip of each
remote branch history.

--shallow-since=<date>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to include
all reachable commits after <date>.

--shallow-exclude=<ref>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to exclude
commits reachable from a specified remote branch or tag. This
option can be specified multiple times.

--unshallow
If the source repository is complete, convert a shallow
repository to a complete one, removing all the limitations
imposed by shallow repositories.

If the source repository is shallow, fetch as much as possible so
that the current repository has the same history as the source
repository.

--update-shallow
By default when fetching from a shallow repository, git fetch
refuses refs that require updating .git/shallow. This option
updates .git/shallow and accepts such refs.

--negotiation-tip=<commit|glob>
By default, Git will report, to the server, commits reachable
from all local refs to find common commits in an attempt to
reduce the size of the to-be-received packfile. If specified, Git
will only report commits reachable from the given tips. This is
useful to speed up fetches when the user knows which local ref is
likely to have commits in common with the upstream ref being
fetched.

This option may be specified more than once; if so, Git will
report commits reachable from any of the given commits.

The argument to this option may be a glob on ref names, a ref, or
the (possibly abbreviated) SHA-1 of a commit. Specifying a glob
is equivalent to specifying this option multiple times, one for
each matching ref name.

See also the fetch.negotiationAlgorithm and push.negotiate
configuration variables documented in git-config(1), and the
--negotiate-only option below.

--negotiate-only
Do not fetch anything from the server, and instead print the
ancestors of the provided --negotiation-tip=* arguments, which we
have in common with the server.

This is incompatible with --recurse-submodules=[yes|on-demand].
Internally this is used to implement the push.negotiate option,
see git-config(1).

--dry-run
Show what would be done, without making any changes.

--porcelain
Print the output to standard output in an easy-to-parse format
for scripts. See section OUTPUT in git-fetch(1) for details.

This is incompatible with --recurse-submodules=[yes|on-demand]
and takes precedence over the fetch.output config option.

--[no-]write-fetch-head
Write the list of remote refs fetched in the FETCH_HEAD file
directly under $GIT_DIR. This is the default. Passing
--no-write-fetch-head from the command line tells Git not to
write the file. Under --dry-run option, the file is never
written.

-f, --force
When git fetch is used with <src>:<dst> refspec, it may refuse to
update the local branch as discussed in the <refspec> part below.
This option overrides that check.

-k, --keep
Keep downloaded pack.

--multiple
Allow several <repository> and <group> arguments to be specified.
No <refspec>s may be specified.

--[no-]auto-maintenance, --[no-]auto-gc
Run git maintenance run --auto at the end to perform automatic
repository maintenance if needed. (--[no-]auto-gc is a synonym.)
This is enabled by default.

--[no-]write-commit-graph
Write a commit-graph after fetching. This overrides the config
setting fetch.writeCommitGraph.

--prefetch
Modify the configured refspec to place all refs into the
refs/prefetch/ namespace. See the prefetch task in git-
maintenance(1).

-p, --prune
Before fetching, remove any remote-tracking references that no
longer exist on the remote. Tags are not subject to pruning if
they are fetched only because of the default tag auto-following
or due to a --tags option. However, if tags are fetched due to an
explicit refspec (either on the command line or in the remote
configuration, for example if the remote was cloned with the
--mirror option), then they are also subject to pruning.
Supplying --prune-tags is a shorthand for providing the tag
refspec.

See the PRUNING section below for more details.

-P, --prune-tags
Before fetching, remove any local tags that no longer exist on
the remote if --prune is enabled. This option should be used more
carefully, unlike --prune it will remove any local references
(local tags) that have been created. This option is a shorthand
for providing the explicit tag refspec along with --prune, see
the discussion about that in its documentation.

See the PRUNING section below for more details.

-n, --no-tags
By default, tags that point at objects that are downloaded from
the remote repository are fetched and stored locally. This option
disables this automatic tag following. The default behavior for a
remote may be specified with the remote.<name>.tagOpt setting.
See git-config(1).

--refetch
Instead of negotiating with the server to avoid transferring
commits and associated objects that are already present locally,
this option fetches all objects as a fresh clone would. Use this
to reapply a partial clone filter from configuration or using
--filter= when the filter definition has changed. Automatic
post-fetch maintenance will perform object database pack
consolidation to remove any duplicate objects.

--refmap=<refspec>
When fetching refs listed on the command line, use the specified
refspec (can be given more than once) to map the refs to
remote-tracking branches, instead of the values of remote.*.fetch
configuration variables for the remote repository. Providing an
empty <refspec> to the --refmap option causes Git to ignore the
configured refspecs and rely entirely on the refspecs supplied as
command-line arguments. See section on "Configured
Remote-tracking Branches" for details.

-t, --tags
Fetch all tags from the remote (i.e., fetch remote tags
refs/tags/* into local tags with the same name), in addition to
whatever else would otherwise be fetched. Using this option alone
does not subject tags to pruning, even if --prune is used (though
tags may be pruned anyway if they are also the destination of an
explicit refspec; see --prune).

--recurse-submodules[=(yes|on-demand|no)]
This option controls if and under what conditions new commits of
submodules should be fetched too. When recursing through
submodules, git fetch always attempts to fetch "changed"
submodules, that is, a submodule that has commits that are
referenced by a newly fetched superproject commit but are missing
in the local submodule clone. A changed submodule can be fetched
as long as it is present locally e.g. in $GIT_DIR/modules/ (see
gitsubmodules(7)); if the upstream adds a new submodule, that
submodule cannot be fetched until it is cloned e.g. by git
submodule update.

When set to on-demand, only changed submodules are fetched. When
set to yes, all populated submodules are fetched and submodules
that are both unpopulated and changed are fetched. When set to
no, submodules are never fetched.

When unspecified, this uses the value of fetch.recurseSubmodules
if it is set (see git-config(1)), defaulting to on-demand if
unset. When this option is used without any value, it defaults to
yes.

-j, --jobs=<n>
Number of parallel children to be used for all forms of fetching.

If the --multiple option was specified, the different remotes
will be fetched in parallel. If multiple submodules are fetched,
they will be fetched in parallel. To control them independently,
use the config settings fetch.parallel and submodule.fetchJobs
(see git-config(1)).

Typically, parallel recursive and multi-remote fetches will be
faster. By default fetches are performed sequentially, not in
parallel.

--no-recurse-submodules
Disable recursive fetching of submodules (this has the same
effect as using the --recurse-submodules=no option).

--set-upstream
If the remote is fetched successfully, add upstream (tracking)
reference, used by argument-less git-pull(1) and other commands.
For more information, see branch.<name>.merge and
branch.<name>.remote in git-config(1).

--submodule-prefix=<path>
Prepend <path> to paths printed in informative messages such as
"Fetching submodule foo". This option is used internally when
recursing over submodules.

--recurse-submodules-default=[yes|on-demand]
This option is used internally to temporarily provide a
non-negative default value for the --recurse-submodules option.
All other methods of configuring fetch's submodule recursion
(such as settings in gitmodules(5) and git-config(1)) override
this option, as does specifying --[no-]recurse-submodules
directly.

-u, --update-head-ok
By default git fetch refuses to update the head which corresponds
to the current branch. This flag disables the check. This is
purely for the internal use for git pull to communicate with git
fetch, and unless you are implementing your own Porcelain you are
not supposed to use it.

--upload-pack <upload-pack>
When given, and the repository to fetch from is handled by git
fetch-pack, --exec=<upload-pack> is passed to the command to
specify non-default path for the command run on the other end.

-q, --quiet
Pass --quiet to git-fetch-pack and silence any other internally
used git commands. Progress is not reported to the standard error
stream.

-v, --verbose
Be verbose.

--progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by
default when it is attached to a terminal, unless -q is
specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard
error stream is not directed to a terminal.

-o <option>, --server-option=<option>
Transmit the given string to the server when communicating using
protocol version 2. The given string must not contain a NUL or LF
character. The server's handling of server options, including
unknown ones, is server-specific. When multiple
--server-option=<option> are given, they are all sent to the
other side in the order listed on the command line. When no
--server-option=<option> is given from the command line, the
values of configuration variable remote.<name>.serverOption are
used instead.

--show-forced-updates
By default, git checks if a branch is force-updated during fetch.
This can be disabled through fetch.showForcedUpdates, but the
--show-forced-updates option guarantees this check occurs. See
git-config(1).

--no-show-forced-updates
By default, git checks if a branch is force-updated during fetch.
Pass --no-show-forced-updates or set fetch.showForcedUpdates to
false to skip this check for performance reasons. If used during
git-pull the --ff-only option will still check for forced updates
before attempting a fast-forward update. See git-config(1).

-4, --ipv4
Use IPv4 addresses only, ignoring IPv6 addresses.

-6, --ipv6
Use IPv6 addresses only, ignoring IPv4 addresses.

<repository>
The "remote" repository that is the source of a fetch or pull
operation. This parameter can be either a URL (see the section
GIT URLS below) or the name of a remote (see the section REMOTES
below).

<group>
A name referring to a list of repositories as the value of
remotes.<group> in the configuration file. (See git-config(1)).

<refspec>
Specifies which refs to fetch and which local refs to update.
When no <refspec>s appear on the command line, the refs to fetch
are read from remote.<repository>.fetch variables instead (see
CONFIGURED REMOTE-TRACKING BRANCHES below).

The format of a <refspec> parameter is an optional plus +,
followed by the source <src>, followed by a colon :, followed by
the destination <dst>. The colon can be omitted when <dst> is
empty. <src> is typically a ref, or a glob pattern with a single
* that is used to match a set of refs, but it can also be a fully
spelled hex object name.

A <refspec> may contain a * in its <src> to indicate a simple
pattern match. Such a refspec functions like a glob that matches
any ref with the pattern. A pattern <refspec> must have one and
only one * in both the <src> and <dst>. It will map refs to the
destination by replacing the * with the contents matched from the
source.

If a refspec is prefixed by ^, it will be interpreted as a
negative refspec. Rather than specifying which refs to fetch or
which local refs to update, such a refspec will instead specify
refs to exclude. A ref will be considered to match if it matches
at least one positive refspec, and does not match any negative
refspec. Negative refspecs can be useful to restrict the scope of
a pattern refspec so that it will not include specific refs.
Negative refspecs can themselves be pattern refspecs. However,
they may only contain a <src> and do not specify a <dst>. Fully
spelled out hex object names are also not supported.

tag <tag> means the same as refs/tags/<tag>:refs/tags/<tag>; it
requests fetching everything up to the given tag.

The remote ref that matches <src> is fetched, and if <dst> is not
an empty string, an attempt is made to update the local ref that
matches it.

Whether that update is allowed without --force depends on the ref
namespace it's being fetched to, the type of object being
fetched, and whether the update is considered to be a
fast-forward. Generally, the same rules apply for fetching as
when pushing, see the <refspec>... section of git-push(1) for
what those are. Exceptions to those rules particular to git fetch
are noted below.

Until Git version 2.20, and unlike when pushing with git-push(1),
any updates to refs/tags/* would be accepted without + in the
refspec (or --force). When fetching, we promiscuously considered
all tag updates from a remote to be forced fetches. Since Git
version 2.20, fetching to update refs/tags/* works the same way
as when pushing. I.e. any updates will be rejected without + in
the refspec (or --force).

Unlike when pushing with git-push(1), any updates outside of
refs/{tags,heads}/* will be accepted without + in the refspec (or
--force), whether that's swapping e.g. a tree object for a blob,
or a commit for another commit that doesn't have the previous
commit as an ancestor etc.

Unlike when pushing with git-push(1), there is no configuration
which'll amend these rules, and nothing like a pre-fetch hook
analogous to the pre-receive hook.

As with pushing with git-push(1), all of the rules described
above about what's not allowed as an update can be overridden by
adding an optional leading + to a refspec (or using the --force
command line option). The only exception to this is that no
amount of forcing will make the refs/heads/* namespace accept a
non-commit object.

Note
When the remote branch you want to fetch is known to be
rewound and rebased regularly, it is expected that its new
tip will not be a descendant of its previous tip (as stored
in your remote-tracking branch the last time you fetched).
You would want to use the + sign to indicate non-fast-forward
updates will be needed for such branches. There is no way to
determine or declare that a branch will be made available in
a repository with this behavior; the pulling user simply must
know this is the expected usage pattern for a branch.

--stdin
Read refspecs, one per line, from stdin in addition to those
provided as arguments. The "tag <name>" format is not supported.

GIT URLS

In general, URLs contain information about the transport protocol,
the address of the remote server, and the path to the repository.
Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be
absent.

Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp
and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and
deprecated; do not use them).

The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and
should be used with caution on unsecured networks.

The following syntaxes may be used with them:

+o ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

+o git://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

+o http[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

+o ftp[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh
protocol:

+o [<user>@]<host>:/<path-to-git-repo>

This syntax is only recognized if there are no slashes before the
first colon. This helps differentiate a local path that contains a
colon. For example the local path foo:bar could be specified as an
absolute path or ./foo:bar to avoid being misinterpreted as an ssh
url.

The ssh and git protocols additionally support ~<username> expansion:

+o ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>

+o git://<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>

+o [<user>@]<host>:~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>

For local repositories, also supported by Git natively, the following
syntaxes may be used:

+o /path/to/repo.git/

+o file:///path/to/repo.git/

These two syntaxes are mostly equivalent, except when cloning, when
the former implies --local option. See git-clone(1) for details.

git clone, git fetch and git pull, but not git push, will also accept
a suitable bundle file. See git-bundle(1).

When Git doesn't know how to handle a certain transport protocol, it
attempts to use the remote-<transport> remote helper, if one exists.
To explicitly request a remote helper, the following syntax may be
used:

+o <transport>::<address>

where <address> may be a path, a server and path, or an arbitrary
URL-like string recognized by the specific remote helper being
invoked. See gitremote-helpers(7) for details.

If there are a large number of similarly-named remote repositories
and you want to use a different format for them (such that the URLs
you use will be rewritten into URLs that work), you can create a
configuration section of the form:

[url "<actual-url-base>"]
insteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

[url "git://git.host.xz/"]
insteadOf = host.xz:/path/to/
insteadOf = work:

a URL like "work:repo.git" or like "host.xz:/path/to/repo.git" will
be rewritten in any context that takes a URL to be
"git://git.host.xz/repo.git".

If you want to rewrite URLs for push only, you can create a
configuration section of the form:

[url "<actual-url-base>"]
pushInsteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

[url "ssh://example.org/"]
pushInsteadOf = git://example.org/

a URL like "git://example.org/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten to
"ssh://example.org/path/to/repo.git" for pushes, but pulls will still
use the original URL.

REMOTES

The name of one of the following can be used instead of a URL as
<repository> argument:

+o a remote in the Git configuration file: $GIT_DIR/config,

+o a file in the $GIT_DIR/remotes directory, or

+o a file in the $GIT_DIR/branches directory.

All of these also allow you to omit the refspec from the command line
because they each contain a refspec which git will use by default.

Named remote in configuration file

You can choose to provide the name of a remote which you had
previously configured using git-remote(1), git-config(1) or even by a
manual edit to the $GIT_DIR/config file. The URL of this remote will
be used to access the repository. The refspec of this remote will be
used by default when you do not provide a refspec on the command
line. The entry in the config file would appear like this:

[remote "<name>"]
url = <URL>
pushurl = <pushurl>
push = <refspec>
fetch = <refspec>

The <pushurl> is used for pushes only. It is optional and defaults to
<URL>. Pushing to a remote affects all defined pushurls or all
defined urls if no pushurls are defined. Fetch, however, will only
fetch from the first defined url if multiple urls are defined.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/remotes
You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/remotes. The
URL in this file will be used to access the repository. The refspec
in this file will be used as default when you do not provide a
refspec on the command line. This file should have the following
format:

URL: one of the above URL formats
Push: <refspec>
Pull: <refspec>

Push: lines are used by git push and Pull: lines are used by git pull
and git fetch. Multiple Push: and Pull: lines may be specified for
additional branch mappings.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/branches
You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/branches.
The URL in this file will be used to access the repository. This file
should have the following format:

<URL>#<head>

<URL> is required; #<head> is optional.

Depending on the operation, git will use one of the following
refspecs, if you don't provide one on the command line. <branch> is
the name of this file in $GIT_DIR/branches and <head> defaults to
master.

git fetch uses:

refs/heads/<head>:refs/heads/<branch>

git push uses:

HEAD:refs/heads/<head>

CONFIGURED REMOTE-TRACKING BRANCHES
You often interact with the same remote repository by regularly and
repeatedly fetching from it. In order to keep track of the progress
of such a remote repository, git fetch allows you to configure
remote.<repository>.fetch configuration variables.

Typically such a variable may look like this:

[remote "origin"]
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

This configuration is used in two ways:

+o When git fetch is run without specifying what branches and/or
tags to fetch on the command line, e.g. git fetch origin or git
fetch, remote.<repository>.fetch values are used as the
refspecs--they specify which refs to fetch and which local refs
to update. The example above will fetch all branches that exist
in the origin (i.e. any ref that matches the left-hand side of
the value, refs/heads/*) and update the corresponding
remote-tracking branches in the refs/remotes/origin/* hierarchy.

+o When git fetch is run with explicit branches and/or tags to fetch
on the command line, e.g. git fetch origin master, the
<refspec>s given on the command line determine what are to be
fetched (e.g. master in the example, which is a short-hand for
master:, which in turn means "fetch the master branch but I do
not explicitly say what remote-tracking branch to update with it
from the command line"), and the example command will fetch only
the master branch. The remote.<repository>.fetch values determine
which remote-tracking branch, if any, is updated. When used in
this way, the remote.<repository>.fetch values do not have any
effect in deciding what gets fetched (i.e. the values are not
used as refspecs when the command-line lists refspecs); they are
only used to decide where the refs that are fetched are stored by
acting as a mapping.

The latter use of the remote.<repository>.fetch values can be
overridden by giving the --refmap=<refspec> parameter(s) on the
command line.

PRUNING

Git has a default disposition of keeping data unless it's explicitly
thrown away; this extends to holding onto local references to
branches on remotes that have themselves deleted those branches.

If left to accumulate, these stale references might make performance
worse on big and busy repos that have a lot of branch churn, and e.g.
make the output of commands like git branch -a --contains <commit>
needlessly verbose, as well as impacting anything else that'll work
with the complete set of known references.

These remote-tracking references can be deleted as a one-off with
either of:

# While fetching
$ git fetch --prune <name>

# Only prune, don't fetch
$ git remote prune <name>

To prune references as part of your normal workflow without needing
to remember to run that, set fetch.prune globally, or
remote.<name>.prune per-remote in the config. See git-config(1).

Here's where things get tricky and more specific. The pruning feature
doesn't actually care about branches, instead it'll prune local <-->
remote-references as a function of the refspec of the remote (see
<refspec> and CONFIGURED REMOTE-TRACKING BRANCHES above).

Therefore if the refspec for the remote includes e.g.
refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*, or you manually run e.g. git fetch --prune
<name> "refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*" it won't be stale remote tracking
branches that are deleted, but any local tag that doesn't exist on
the remote.

This might not be what you expect, i.e. you want to prune remote
<name>, but also explicitly fetch tags from it, so when you fetch
from it you delete all your local tags, most of which may not have
come from the <name> remote in the first place.

So be careful when using this with a refspec like
refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*, or any other refspec which might map
references from multiple remotes to the same local namespace.

Since keeping up-to-date with both branches and tags on the remote is
a common use-case the --prune-tags option can be supplied along with
--prune to prune local tags that don't exist on the remote, and
force-update those tags that differ. Tag pruning can also be enabled
with fetch.pruneTags or remote.<name>.pruneTags in the config. See
git-config(1).

The --prune-tags option is equivalent to having
refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* declared in the refspecs of the remote. This
can lead to some seemingly strange interactions:

# These both fetch tags
$ git fetch --no-tags origin 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'
$ git fetch --no-tags --prune-tags origin

The reason it doesn't error out when provided without --prune or its
config versions is for flexibility of the configured versions, and to
maintain a 1=1 mapping between what the command line flags do, and
what the configuration versions do.

It's reasonable to e.g. configure fetch.pruneTags=true in
~/.gitconfig to have tags pruned whenever git fetch --prune is run,
without making every invocation of git fetch without --prune an
error.

Pruning tags with --prune-tags also works when fetching a URL instead
of a named remote. These will all prune tags not found on origin:

$ git fetch origin --prune --prune-tags
$ git fetch origin --prune 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'
$ git fetch <url-of-origin> --prune --prune-tags
$ git fetch <url-of-origin> --prune 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'

OUTPUT

The output of "git fetch" depends on the transport method used; this
section describes the output when fetching over the Git protocol
(either locally or via ssh) and Smart HTTP protocol.

The status of the fetch is output in tabular form, with each line
representing the status of a single ref. Each line is of the form:

<flag> <summary> <from> -> <to> [<reason>]

When using --porcelain, the output format is intended to be
machine-parseable. In contrast to the human-readable output formats
it thus prints to standard output instead of standard error. Each
line is of the form:

<flag> <old-object-id> <new-object-id> <local-reference>

The status of up-to-date refs is shown only if the --verbose option
is used.

In compact output mode, specified with configuration variable
fetch.output, if either entire <from> or <to> is found in the other
string, it will be substituted with * in the other string. For
example, master -> origin/master becomes master -> origin/*.

flag
A single character indicating the status of the ref:

(space)
for a successfully fetched fast-forward;

+
for a successful forced update;

-
for a successfully pruned ref;

t
for a successful tag update;

*
for a successfully fetched new ref;

!
for a ref that was rejected or failed to update; and

=
for a ref that was up to date and did not need fetching.

summary
For a successfully fetched ref, the summary shows the old and new
values of the ref in a form suitable for using as an argument to
git log (this is <old>..<new> in most cases, and <old>...<new>
for forced non-fast-forward updates).

from
The name of the remote ref being fetched from, minus its
refs/<type>/ prefix. In the case of deletion, the name of the
remote ref is "(none)".

to
The name of the local ref being updated, minus its refs/<type>/
prefix.

reason
A human-readable explanation. In the case of successfully fetched
refs, no explanation is needed. For a failed ref, the reason for
failure is described.

EXAMPLES

+o Update the remote-tracking branches:

$ git fetch origin

The above command copies all branches from the remote refs/heads/
namespace and stores them to the local refs/remotes/origin/
namespace, unless the remote.<repository>.fetch option is used to
specify a non-default refspec.

+o Using refspecs explicitly:

$ git fetch origin +seen:seen maint:tmp

This updates (or creates, as necessary) branches seen and tmp in
the local repository by fetching from the branches (respectively)
seen and maint from the remote repository.

The seen branch will be updated even if it does not fast-forward,
because it is prefixed with a plus sign; tmp will not be.

+o Peek at a remote's branch, without configuring the remote in your
local repository:

$ git fetch git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git maint
$ git log FETCH_HEAD

The first command fetches the maint branch from the repository at
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git and the second command
uses FETCH_HEAD to examine the branch with git-log(1). The
fetched objects will eventually be removed by git's built-in
housekeeping (see git-gc(1)).

SECURITY

The fetch and push protocols are not designed to prevent one side
from stealing data from the other repository that was not intended to
be shared. If you have private data that you need to protect from a
malicious peer, your best option is to store it in another
repository. This applies to both clients and servers. In particular,
namespaces on a server are not effective for read access control; you
should only grant read access to a namespace to clients that you
would trust with read access to the entire repository.

The known attack vectors are as follows:

1. The victim sends "have" lines advertising the IDs of objects it
has that are not explicitly intended to be shared but can be used
to optimize the transfer if the peer also has them. The attacker
chooses an object ID X to steal and sends a ref to X, but isn't
required to send the content of X because the victim already has
it. Now the victim believes that the attacker has X, and it sends
the content of X back to the attacker later. (This attack is most
straightforward for a client to perform on a server, by creating
a ref to X in the namespace the client has access to and then
fetching it. The most likely way for a server to perform it on a
client is to "merge" X into a public branch and hope that the
user does additional work on this branch and pushes it back to
the server without noticing the merge.)

2. As in #1, the attacker chooses an object ID X to steal. The
victim sends an object Y that the attacker already has, and the
attacker falsely claims to have X and not Y, so the victim sends
Y as a delta against X. The delta reveals regions of X that are
similar to Y to the attacker.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included
from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as
what's found there:

fetch.recurseSubmodules
This option controls whether git fetch (and the underlying fetch
in git pull) will recursively fetch into populated submodules.
This option can be set either to a boolean value or to on-demand.
Setting it to a boolean changes the behavior of fetch and pull to
recurse unconditionally into submodules when set to true or to
not recurse at all when set to false. When set to on-demand,
fetch and pull will only recurse into a populated submodule when
its superproject retrieves a commit that updates the submodule's
reference. Defaults to on-demand, or to the value of
submodule.recurse if set.

fetch.fsckObjects
If it is set to true, git-fetch-pack will check all fetched
objects. See transfer.fsckObjects for what's checked. Defaults to
false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used
instead.

fetch.fsck.<msg-id>
Acts like fsck.<msg-id>, but is used by git-fetch-pack(1) instead
of git-fsck(1). See the fsck.<msg-id> documentation for details.

fetch.fsck.skipList
Acts like fsck.skipList, but is used by git-fetch-pack(1) instead
of git-fsck(1). See the fsck.skipList documentation for details.

fetch.unpackLimit
If the number of objects fetched over the Git native transfer is
below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose
object files. However if the number of received objects equals or
exceeds this limit then the received pack will be stored as a
pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from
a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on
slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit
is used instead.

fetch.prune
If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the --prune option
was given on the command line. See also remote.<name>.prune and
the PRUNING section of git-fetch(1).

fetch.pruneTags
If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the
refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* refspec was provided when pruning, if not
set already. This allows for setting both this option and
fetch.prune to maintain a 1=1 mapping to upstream refs. See also
remote.<name>.pruneTags and the PRUNING section of git-fetch(1).

fetch.all
If true, fetch will attempt to update all available remotes. This
behavior can be overridden by passing --no-all or by explicitly
specifying one or more remote(s) to fetch from. Defaults to
false.

fetch.output
Control how ref update status is printed. Valid values are full
and compact. Default value is full. See the OUTPUT section in
git-fetch(1) for details.

fetch.negotiationAlgorithm
Control how information about the commits in the local repository
is sent when negotiating the contents of the packfile to be sent
by the server. Set to "consecutive" to use an algorithm that
walks over consecutive commits checking each one. Set to
"skipping" to use an algorithm that skips commits in an effort to
converge faster, but may result in a larger-than-necessary
packfile; or set to "noop" to not send any information at all,
which will almost certainly result in a larger-than-necessary
packfile, but will skip the negotiation step. Set to "default" to
override settings made previously and use the default behaviour.
The default is normally "consecutive", but if
feature.experimental is true, then the default is "skipping".
Unknown values will cause git fetch to error out.

See also the --negotiate-only and --negotiation-tip options to
git-fetch(1).

fetch.showForcedUpdates
Set to false to enable --no-show-forced-updates in git-fetch(1)
and git-pull(1) commands. Defaults to true.

fetch.parallel
Specifies the maximal number of fetch operations to be run in
parallel at a time (submodules, or remotes when the --multiple
option of git-fetch(1) is in effect).

A value of 0 will give some reasonable default. If unset, it
defaults to 1.

For submodules, this setting can be overridden using the
submodule.fetchJobs config setting.

fetch.writeCommitGraph
Set to true to write a commit-graph after every git fetch command
that downloads a pack-file from a remote. Using the --split
option, most executions will create a very small commit-graph
file on top of the existing commit-graph file(s). Occasionally,
these files will merge and the write may take longer. Having an
updated commit-graph file helps performance of many Git commands,
including git merge-base, git push -f, and git log --graph.
Defaults to false.

fetch.bundleURI
This value stores a URI for downloading Git object data from a
bundle URI before performing an incremental fetch from the origin
Git server. This is similar to how the --bundle-uri option
behaves in git-clone(1). git clone --bundle-uri will set the
fetch.bundleURI value if the supplied bundle URI contains a
bundle list that is organized for incremental fetches.

If you modify this value and your repository has a
fetch.bundleCreationToken value, then remove that
fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching from the new
bundle URI.

fetch.bundleCreationToken
When using fetch.bundleURI to fetch incrementally from a bundle
list that uses the "creationToken" heuristic, this config value
stores the maximum creationToken value of the downloaded bundles.
This value is used to prevent downloading bundles in the future
if the advertised creationToken is not strictly larger than this
value.

The creation token values are chosen by the provider serving the
specific bundle URI. If you modify the URI at fetch.bundleURI,
then be sure to remove the value for the
fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching.

BUGS

Using --recurse-submodules can only fetch new commits in submodules
that are present locally e.g. in $GIT_DIR/modules/. If the upstream
adds a new submodule, that submodule cannot be fetched until it is
cloned e.g. by git submodule update. This is expected to be fixed in
a future Git version.

SEE ALSO

git-pull(1)

GIT

Part of the git(1) suite

Git 2.48.1 2025-01-13 GIT-FETCH(1)