[GIT] How to checkout a remote branch

source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1783405/git-checkout-remote-branch

question:

I am trying to checkout a remote branch:

Somebody pushed a branch called test with git push origin test to a shared repository. I can see the branch with git branch -r. But how can I get this branch?

• git checkout test does nothing
• git checkout origin/test does something, but git branch says * (no branch). I am on no branch?

How do I share branches via a public repository?

answer:
Before you can start working locally on a remote branch, you need to fetch it as called out in answers below.

To fetch a branch, you simply need to:

git fetch origin

This will fetch all of the remote branches for you. You can see the branches available for checkout with:

git branch -v -a

With the remote branches in hand, you now need to check out the branch you are interested in, giving you a local working copy:

git checkout -b test origin/test

EDIT - The answer below actually improves on this. On Git>=1.6.6 you can just do:

git fetch
git checkout test