Animated Git #4: Understand How Divergent Branches Appear After Fetching a Remote Repository

A picture is worth a thousand words! The Animated Git series continues. The series introduces core Git concepts with pictures and animations. If you missed it, watch and read :

• Part 1 – Gain precise control over your next commit
• Part 2 – Work offline on your own local repository
• Part 3 – Remember the latest synced version and push your local changes

This fourth part presents how divergent branches can appear in your repository. You’ll better understand why they are called “branches”.

Work in parallel

As you learned in Part 2, you commit locally. As a result, two team members can create commits on top of origin/master in parallel (read Part 3 to learn more about this branch):

Bob is free to push his work to the team’s repository:

Fetch from the remote repository

Alice is now out of sync with the team’s repository and, as a result, is unable to push her work. She must re-synchronize her local repository by fetching the shared repository (called “origin”, as explained in Part 3) :

$ git fetch origin

As you can see, Alice’s master and origin/master branches have diverged, like two branches of a tree:

We recommend the following articles to learn more about branches and fetching a remote repository:

• https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/syncing/git-fetch
• https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/using-branches/git-branch
• https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Remote-Branches

A new animated series will start soon. Follow us on @WakandaSoft to catch it!