Git: automatic fetching from remote repositories?

Question

One irritating thing I find about using command line Git is having to manually sync my repository with remote repositories. I constantly get tripped up by commands like "git status" that I (mistakenly) expect to report the difference between my working directory and a repository on GitHub. (Of course it reports the difference between my working directory and my local repository...)

Is there any way to get automatic/implicit fetching, so that remotes are always up to date? I would happily pay a penalty of a few seconds for commands like git status, git merge etc.

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered May 05 '12 at 17:23

10

One of those commands is already built in.

git pull

does a fetch and a merge.

For the other one, well....define your own command, such as

alias gitfu='git fetch; git status'

The shell is yours to command.

Depending on your configuration you may be asked for pass phrase or credentials for each of these.

answered May 05 '12 at 17:23

joshp

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Hmm, yeah that actually works ok. Using alias in ~/.gitconfig 'stat = "!git fetch && git status"'. I guess I repeat that for other likely commands. – Steve Bennett May 06 '12 at 04:19
but if you have a password on the repo then? – Muneeb Ahmad Khurram Jun 27 '21 at 22:46
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Then you have to supply that password. If you use an ssh key instead then no need to repeatedly supply a password for this and other Git commands. – joshp Jun 28 '21 at 05:55

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 12 '19 at 07:14

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In zsh, there is the git-auto-fetch plugin which

Automatically fetches all changes from all remotes while you are working in git-initialized directory.

Just add to your plugins in .zshrc.

answered Nov 12 '19 at 07:14

serv-inc

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Winter · Answer 3 · 2012-05-06T09:56:35.270

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If you would prefer to use a GUI like SourceTree, there's a preference option that checks default remotes every X minutes.

You could also set global alias in the global .gitconfig file under [alias]. Such as git fetch --all && git status (add -s for short status). Or possibly git stash && git pull && git stash apply && git status et al, if you currently have changes. But watch out for merge conflicts.

edited May 06 '12 at 09:56

answered May 06 '12 at 09:46

Winter

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Yeah, I'm actually not looking for a GUI solution. But I sure would like to streamline the Git cmd-line experience. – Steve Bennett May 06 '12 at 12:48
I thought [this Peepcode video about Advanced Git](https://peepcode.com/products/advanced-git) was pretty good. [This dotfiles guide](http://dotfiles.github.com/) although not just git commands may stir some ideas as well. – Winter May 06 '12 at 20:33

Git: automatic fetching from remote repositories?

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