How to see whats new in the git main repo without doing a pull

Question

everyday I come into work and I do a "git pull" to get all the updated code in my develop branch.. can someone please tell me a why before I do my pull to see what changed

Answer 1

You could do a git fetch and then git log origin/X to view changes or git diff X origin/X to see the difference between your branches. Once you are happy to merge your changes in, you can do a git merge origin/X while in X.

Answer 2

After a git fetch origin you can use the command git log --left-right --graph --cherry-pick --oneline HEAD...origin/master which will show the difference of commit between you and orign/master.

Answer 3

You can fetch the code and review the log in staging:

➜  cortex git:(master) ✗ git fetch origin
remote: Counting objects: 1229, done.
...
Resolving deltas: 100% (720/720), completed with 117 local objects.
From github.com:icortex/test
   087dfaf..7212fc2  master    -> origin/master
 * [new branch]      test-jobs  -> origin/test-jobs
➜  cortex git:(master) ✗ git log origin/test-jobs

As you can see the branch master has changes and test-jobs is a new branch. Then you can check the log on each branch in "origin".

Answer 4

Consider reading this explanation of git pull, git fetch, git merge and their relations.

To cite this document:

Why not git pull?

Well, git pull is fine most of the time, and particularly if you’re using git in a CVS-like fashion then it’s probably what you want. However, if you want to use git in a more idiomatic way (creating lots of topic branches, rewriting local history whenever you feel like it, and so on) then it helps a lot to get used to doing git fetch and git merge separately.