GIT-CHECKOUT(1)                   Git Manual                   GIT-CHECKOUT(1)



NAME
       git-checkout - Checkout a branch or paths to the working tree

SYNOPSIS
       git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [<branch>]
       git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] --detach [<branch>]
       git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [--detach] <commit>
       git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [[-b|-B|--orphan] <new_branch>] [<start_point>]
       git checkout [-f|--ours|--theirs|-m|--conflict=<style>] [<tree-ish>] [--] <paths>...
       git checkout [-p|--patch] [<tree-ish>] [--] [<paths>...]


DESCRIPTION
       Updates files in the working tree to match the version in the index or
       the specified tree. If no paths are given, git checkout will also
       update HEAD to set the specified branch as the current branch.

       git checkout <branch>
           To prepare for working on <branch>, switch to it by updating the
           index and the files in the working tree, and by pointing HEAD at
           the branch. Local modifications to the files in the working tree
           are kept, so that they can be committed to the <branch>.

           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 checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

           You could omit <branch>, in which case the command degenerates to
           "check out the current branch", which is a glorified no-op with a
           rather expensive side-effects to show only the tracking
           information, if exists, for the current branch.

       git checkout -b|-B <new_branch> [<start point>]
           Specifying -b causes a new branch to be created as if git-branch(1)
           were called and then checked out. In this case you can use the
           --track or --no-track options, which will be passed to git branch.
           As a convenience, --track without -b implies branch creation; see
           the description of --track below.

           If -B is given, <new_branch> is created if it doesn't exist;
           otherwise, it is reset. This is the transactional equivalent of

               $ git branch -f <branch> [<start point>]
               $ git checkout <branch>

           that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless "git
           checkout" is successful.

       git checkout --detach [<branch>], git checkout [--detach] <commit>
           Prepare to work on top of <commit>, by detaching HEAD at it (see
           "DETACHED HEAD" section), and updating the index and the files in
           the working tree. Local modifications to the files in the working
           tree are kept, so that the resulting working tree will be the state
           recorded in the commit plus the local modifications.

           When the <commit> argument is a branch name, the --detach option
           can be used to detach HEAD at the tip of the branch (git checkout
           <branch> would check out that branch without detaching HEAD).

           Omitting <branch> detaches HEAD at the tip of the current branch.

       git checkout [-p|--patch] [<tree-ish>] [--] <pathspec>...
           When <paths> or --patch are given, git checkout does not switch
           branches. It updates the named paths in the working tree from the
           index file or from a named <tree-ish> (most often a commit). In
           this case, the -b and --track options are meaningless and giving
           either of them results in an error. The <tree-ish> argument can be
           used to specify a specific tree-ish (i.e. commit, tag or tree) to
           update the index for the given paths before updating the working
           tree.

           The index may contain unmerged entries because of a previous failed
           merge. By default, if you try to check out such an entry from the
           index, the checkout operation will fail and nothing will be checked
           out. Using -f will ignore these unmerged entries. The contents from
           a specific side of the merge can be checked out of the index by
           using --ours or --theirs. With -m, changes made to the working tree
           file can be discarded to re-create the original conflicted merge
           result.

OPTIONS
       -q, --quiet
           Quiet, suppress feedback messages.

       -f, --force
           When switching branches, proceed even if the index or the working
           tree differs from HEAD. This is used to throw away local changes.

           When checking out paths from the index, do not fail upon unmerged
           entries; instead, unmerged entries are ignored.

       --ours, --theirs
           When checking out paths from the index, check out stage #2 (ours)
           or #3 (theirs) for unmerged paths.

       -b <new_branch>
           Create a new branch named <new_branch> and start it at
           <start_point>; see git-branch(1) for details.

       -B <new_branch>
           Creates the branch <new_branch> and start it at <start_point>; if
           it already exists, then reset it to <start_point>. This is
           equivalent to running "git branch" with "-f"; see git-branch(1) for
           details.

       -t, --track
           When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration. See
           "--track" in git-branch(1) for details.

           If no -b option is given, the name of the new branch will be
           derived from the remote-tracking branch, by looking at the local
           part of the refspec configured for the corresponding remote, and
           then stripping the initial part up to the "*". This would tell us
           to use "hack" as the local branch when branching off of
           "origin/hack" (or "remotes/origin/hack", or even
           "refs/remotes/origin/hack"). If the given name has no slash, or the
           above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted.
           You can explicitly give a name with -b in such a case.

       --no-track
           Do not set up "upstream" configuration, even if the
           branch.autosetupmerge configuration variable is true.

       -l
           Create the new branch's reflog; see git-branch(1) for details.

       --detach
           Rather than checking out a branch to work on it, check out a commit
           for inspection and discardable experiments. This is the default
           behavior of "git checkout <commit>" when <commit> is not a branch
           name. See the "DETACHED HEAD" section below for details.

       --orphan <new_branch>
           Create a new orphan branch, named <new_branch>, started from
           <start_point> and switch to it. The first commit made on this new
           branch will have no parents and it will be the root of a new
           history totally disconnected from all the other branches and
           commits.

           The index and the working tree are adjusted as if you had
           previously run "git checkout <start_point>". This allows you to
           start a new history that records a set of paths similar to
           <start_point> by easily running "git commit -a" to make the root
           commit.

           This can be useful when you want to publish the tree from a commit
           without exposing its full history. You might want to do this to
           publish an open source branch of a project whose current tree is
           "clean", but whose full history contains proprietary or otherwise
           encumbered bits of code.

           If you want to start a disconnected history that records a set of
           paths that is totally different from the one of <start_point>, then
           you should clear the index and the working tree right after
           creating the orphan branch by running "git rm -rf ." from the top
           level of the working tree. Afterwards you will be ready to prepare
           your new files, repopulating the working tree, by copying them from
           elsewhere, extracting a tarball, etc.

       --ignore-skip-worktree-bits
           In sparse checkout mode, git checkout -- <paths> would update only
           entries matched by <paths> and sparse patterns in
           $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout. This option ignores the sparse
           patterns and adds back any files in <paths>.

       -m, --merge
           When switching branches, if you have local modifications to one or
           more files that are different between the current branch and the
           branch to which you are switching, the command refuses to switch
           branches in order to preserve your modifications in context.
           However, with this option, a three-way merge between the current
           branch, your working tree contents, and the new branch is done, and
           you will be on the new branch.

           When a merge conflict happens, the index entries for conflicting
           paths are left unmerged, and you need to resolve the conflicts and
           mark the resolved paths with git add (or git rm if the merge should
           result in deletion of the path).

           When checking out paths from the index, this option lets you
           recreate the conflicted merge in the specified paths.

       --conflict=<style>
           The same as --merge option above, but changes the way the
           conflicting hunks are presented, overriding the merge.conflictstyle
           configuration variable. Possible values are "merge" (default) and
           "diff3" (in addition to what is shown by "merge" style, shows the
           original contents).

       -p, --patch
           Interactively select hunks in the difference between the <tree-ish>
           (or the index, if unspecified) and the working tree. The chosen
           hunks are then applied in reverse to the working tree (and if a
           <tree-ish> was specified, the index).

           This means that you can use git checkout -p to selectively discard
           edits from your current working tree. See the "Interactive Mode"
           section of git-add(1) to learn how to operate the --patch mode.

       <branch>
           Branch to checkout; if it refers to a branch (i.e., a name that,
           when prepended with "refs/heads/", is a valid ref), then that
           branch is checked out. Otherwise, if it refers to a valid commit,
           your HEAD becomes "detached" and you are no longer on any branch
           (see below for details).

           As a special case, the "@{-N}" syntax for the N-th last
           branch/commit checks out branches (instead of detaching). You may
           also specify - which is synonymous with "@{-1}".

           As a further special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for
           the merge base of A and B if there is exactly one merge base. You
           can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults to
           HEAD.

       <new_branch>
           Name for the new branch.

       <start_point>
           The name of a commit at which to start the new branch; see git-
           branch(1) for details. Defaults to HEAD.

       <tree-ish>
           Tree to checkout from (when paths are given). If not specified, the
           index will be used.

DETACHED HEAD
       HEAD normally refers to a named branch (e.g. master). Meanwhile, each
       branch refers to a specific commit. Let's look at a repo with three
       commits, one of them tagged, and with branch master checked out:

                      HEAD (refers to branch 'master')
                       |
                       v
           a---b---c  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'c')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       When a commit is created in this state, the branch is updated to refer
       to the new commit. Specifically, git commit creates a new commit d,
       whose parent is commit c, and then updates branch master to refer to
       new commit d. HEAD still refers to branch master and so indirectly now
       refers to commit d:

           $ edit; git add; git commit

                          HEAD (refers to branch 'master')
                           |
                           v
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       It is sometimes useful to be able to checkout a commit that is not at
       the tip of any named branch, or even to create a new commit that is not
       referenced by a named branch. Let's look at what happens when we
       checkout commit b (here we show two ways this may be done):

           $ git checkout v2.0  # or
           $ git checkout master^^

              HEAD (refers to commit 'b')
               |
               v
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       Notice that regardless of which checkout command we use, HEAD now
       refers directly to commit b. This is known as being in detached HEAD
       state. It means simply that HEAD refers to a specific commit, as
       opposed to referring to a named branch. Let's see what happens when we
       create a commit:

           $ edit; git add; git commit

                HEAD (refers to commit 'e')
                 |
                 v
                 e
                /
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       There is now a new commit e, but it is referenced only by HEAD. We can
       of course add yet another commit in this state:

           $ edit; git add; git commit

                    HEAD (refers to commit 'f')
                     |
                     v
                 e---f
                /
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       In fact, we can perform all the normal Git operations. But, let's look
       at what happens when we then checkout master:

           $ git checkout master

                          HEAD (refers to branch 'master')
                 e---f     |
                /          v
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       It is important to realize that at this point nothing refers to commit
       f. Eventually commit f (and by extension commit e) will be deleted by
       the routine Git garbage collection process, unless we create a
       reference before that happens. If we have not yet moved away from
       commit f, any of these will create a reference to it:

           $ git checkout -b foo   (1)
           $ git branch foo        (2)
           $ git tag foo           (3)


       1. creates a new branch foo, which refers to commit f, and then updates
       HEAD to refer to branch foo. In other words, we'll no longer be in
       detached HEAD state after this command.
       2. similarly creates a new branch foo, which refers to commit f, but
       leaves HEAD detached.
       3. creates a new tag foo, which refers to commit f, leaving HEAD
       detached.

       If we have moved away from commit f, then we must first recover its
       object name (typically by using git reflog), and then we can create a
       reference to it. For example, to see the last two commits to which HEAD
       referred, we can use either of these commands:

           $ git reflog -2 HEAD # or
           $ git log -g -2 HEAD


EXAMPLES
        1. The following sequence checks out the master branch, reverts the
           Makefile to two revisions back, deletes hello.c by mistake, and
           gets it back from the index.

               $ git checkout master             (1)
               $ git checkout master~2 Makefile  (2)
               $ rm -f hello.c
               $ git checkout hello.c            (3)

           1. switch branch
           2. take a file out of another commit
           3. restore hello.c from the index

           If you want to check out all C source files out of the index, you
           can say

               $ git checkout -- '*.c'

           Note the quotes around *.c. The file hello.c will also be checked
           out, even though it is no longer in the working tree, because the
           file globbing is used to match entries in the index (not in the
           working tree by the shell).

           If you have an unfortunate branch that is named hello.c, this step
           would be confused as an instruction to switch to that branch. You
           should instead write:

               $ git checkout -- hello.c


        2. After working in the wrong branch, switching to the correct branch
           would be done using:

               $ git checkout mytopic

           However, your "wrong" branch and correct "mytopic" branch may
           differ in files that you have modified locally, in which case the
           above checkout would fail like this:

               $ git checkout mytopic
               error: You have local changes to 'frotz'; not switching branches.

           You can give the -m flag to the command, which would try a
           three-way merge:

               $ git checkout -m mytopic
               Auto-merging frotz

           After this three-way merge, the local modifications are not
           registered in your index file, so git diff would show you what
           changes you made since the tip of the new branch.

        3. When a merge conflict happens during switching branches with the -m
           option, you would see something like this:

               $ git checkout -m mytopic
               Auto-merging frotz
               ERROR: Merge conflict in frotz
               fatal: merge program failed

           At this point, git diff shows the changes cleanly merged as in the
           previous example, as well as the changes in the conflicted files.
           Edit and resolve the conflict and mark it resolved with git add as
           usual:

               $ edit frotz
               $ git add frotz


GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite



Git 2.1.4                         03/19/2016                   GIT-CHECKOUT(1)
