Git Basics - Collaborating With Git

I now pull, by running something like this to see if there are changes to integrate (as indeed there are in this case):

$ git pull origin main

Key Learning Points:

✅ A git pull is a two-part operation¹. The first part, shown above, is called "fetch", and brings into my repo's DB any commits from the remote that belong to the requested branch and are not already here.

✅ The second part is "merge", which updates my local branch with those changes.

✅ Essentially, a git pull combines these two commands:

$ git fetch origin main  # Grab commits associated with current branch, and update tracking branch
$ git merge origin/main  # Merge into my current branch from the (now-up-to-date) tracking branch

I can run these explicitly, instead of a git pull; perhaps I want to see what's happened on the remote before I integrate those changes, so I might git fetch and take a look before doing a git merge.