Branches with remotes

At some point, it is very likely that you have cloned somebody's repository. This means you have an associated remote. The remote is usually called origin because it is where the source originated from.

While working with Git and remotes, you will get some benefits from Git.

We can start with git status and see what we get while working with the remote.

Getting ready

1. We will start by checking out a local branch that tracks a remote branch:

   $ git checkout -b remoteBugFix --track origin/stable-3.2
   Branch remoteBugFix set up to track remote branch stable-3.2 from origin.
   Switched to a new branch 'remoteBugFix'
   

2. The previous command creates and checks out the remoteBugFix branch that will track the origin/stable-3.2 branch. So, for instance, executing git status will automatically show how different your branch is from origin/stable-3.2, and it will also show whether your branch's HEAD can be fast forwarded to the HEAD of the remote branch or not.

3. To provide an example of how...