fetch

Looks for changes made on a remote repository and brings them in.

The full signature is:

git fetch <remote> <refspec>

where <refspec> is the same as for git push.

You can do a dry run that only lists remote references with ls-remote.

For example, to update you master branch from a remote dev you can do:

git fetch origin dev:master

This will only work for fast-forward changes, because it could be done for any branch, not just the current one, and in that case there is no way to resolve merge conflicts without a working tree.

Omit refspec

Omitting refspec as in:

git fetch <remote>

defaults <refspec> to:

remote.<remote>.fetch, which is set by default on remote creation to +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/<remote>/* configuration, so a matching forced update from remote heads into local remotes/<remote>/.

So after you git fetch origin, you can create a local branch with a shorter name and checkout to it with:
```
git checkout -b local-name origin/remote-branch
```
Remember that this works because .refs/remotes is in the refs search path, and no sane person would have a local reference called .git/heads/origin/remote-branch, or that would have the preference.

Multiple remote.<remote>.fetch entries can be added. A possibly useful one with GitHub, is:
```
fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/pull/origin/*
```
which also fetches all pull requests, which GitHub stores under refs/pulls. You can then checkout with:
```
git checkout -b 999 pull/origin/999
```
Remember that just origin/999 won’t work because refs/pulls is not in the refs search path.

Also note that this configuration would might pull a lot of references, so you might be better off with one off commands like:
```
git fetch origin pull/<pr-number>/head:local-name
```
origin

This hasn’t changed in Git 2.0, and is therefore simpler than the default refspec for git push.

Omit remote

Defaults the remote to the first defined of:

branch.<name>.remote
origin

FETCH_HEAD

A reference that points to the latest fetched branch.

Common use case: get a single commit not on the main repository, often on the fork feature branch of a pull request, to try it out locally without merging or adding a new remote:

git fetch origin pull/<pr-number>/head
git checkout -b <local-branch-name> FETCH_HEAD