Fetch and Pull

Since we now have a local and remote repository, let’s see how fetch and pull can help us. If you go to your UI of Gitlab and alter a file (or create a new one), it will not show locally. To ensure you are in sync with the remote repository we must get those new commits into our local repository.

Fig 9

Fetch

What if you only wanted to see changes made to an upstream, but not have them merged in? This is where fetch comes into play. This action can really come into play when we discuss Forking a repository.

We need to check if we have our Gitlab Repository set as the origin

git remote -v

If this comes back with nothing,and most likely will, you will want to add your clone link as the origin. The reason this will need to be done, we created the repository locally on your machine.

git remote add origin git@gitlab.com:username/ansible_lab.git      # use your Gitlab username
git remote -v                                                      # Check origin is set
git fetch origin                                                   # Fetch origin updates
git log origin/main ^main                                          # Show commit differences

We only see the differences, the new files are not merged into our local project.

Pull

Pull shorthand for fetch + merge makes keeping our local repository in sync easy.

git pull origin main