How to download a branch with git?

Question

So I have a project hosted on github. I created a branch on one computer, then pushed my changes to github with

git push origin branch-name

Now I am on a different computer, and I want to download that branch. So I tried

git pull origin branch-name

but all this did was overwrite my master branch with the changes in my new branch.

What do I need to do to properly pull my remote branch?

Answer 1

Create a new directory, and do a clone instead.

git clone (address of origin) (name of branch)

Answer 2

You could use git remote like:

git remote fetch origin

and then setup a local branch to track the remote branch like below:

git branch --track [local-branch-name] origin/remote-branch-name

You would now have the contents of the remote github branch in local-branch-name.

You could switch to that local-branch-name and start work:

git checkout [local-branch-name]

Answer 3

Thanks to a related question, I found out that that I need to "checkout" the remote branch as a new local branch, and specify a new local branch name.

git checkout -b newlocalbranchname origin/branch-name