Pulling Changes

As a matter of fact, fetching and then immediately merging changes is an extremely common scenario. That's why Git provides a single command, git pull, that combines these two operations and integrates the changes into the current branch.

Let's now pull the remote changes made by John into our local repository:

As you can see, the output of this command is basically a combination of the outputs of the git fetch and git merge commands.

You can also run the git remote show origin command to see that there is indeed a remote john/test branch, but our local repository doesn't have the corresponding local branch.

Let's create a local branch for it by running the git checkout command:

Let's break down what has just happened:

1. We switched to the john/test branch;
2. Git automatically copied the remote branch's contents into the local branch;
3. The working tree has been updated to reflect the contents of the john/test branch.

We can easily verify that we are on this branch and that it is up-to-date with its remote counterpart by looking at the latest commit: