Let's start with a primer on both commands

How would you evaluate the usage of those commands if you were tasked to do some commits in a team?

Which of those commands is more destructive than the other?

Read on to discover and if you enjoyed this article, leave a like or a unicorn or whatever makes you happier and it will surely make me happy aswell!

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git pull

In it's simplest usage, git pull just wants you to be happy and up-to-date with whatever changes occurred to the remote repository. Any changes, anything at all will be pulled from the remote repo and automatically merged into your cloned local repository.

See where I'm getting at? It can be problematic, especially the automatic part.

git fetch

To make sure that we are up-to-date with remote changes but without the fear of destroying the subtle existence of our local changes we can do git fetch which will (you guessed it!) fetch any commits that were done remotely and do not exist on your local repo, keeping you repo up-to-date without merging the new changes with your current branch, making it safer to update without worrying too much about disruption brought by merging conflicts and so on.

The difference between pull and fetch

So, what's the big time difference between those two commands? Usage and timing.

git pull actually does a git fetch followed by a git merge, so, if you just want to keep your repository updated while working on your own local commits, make sure you do a lot of git fetch(es) to avoid changes in your refs/heads (where you are working) but still keeping your refs/remotes up-to-date.

Goodbyes

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