github how to checkout production branch

Question

I have a private project hosted on github. I have a production branch of that project. I got a new machine and I need to fix something on production. This is what I did.

git clone git@github.com:userid/project.git
# now I have master branch
git co -b production
git pull origin production

Using the above mechanism I am able to get production branch but I am getting merge conflicts which I do not want to deal with right now.

Is there a cleaner way of jut getting the production branch code on my local machine?

Answer 1

You could checkout directly the remote branch after fetching it

git fetch origin
git branch -f production origin/production
git checkout production

or shorter:

git checkout -b production origin/production

or, with Git 2.23+ (Q3 2019) and git switch:

git switch production

If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name, treat as equivalent to

git switch -c <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

You would be directly working from the fetched copy of origin/production branch (no conflict there).

By doing

git co -b production
git pull origin production

You are trying to merge the remote production branch into your master (in a local 'production' branch, which means potentially conflicts if your master has locally a different history than the remote origin/production branch.

Answer 2

git checkout -b production by itself will checkout a new branch called production based on the branch you currently have checked out, the master.

It's likely that what you actually wanted to do was:

git checkout -b production origin/production