Can You Update All Git Branches At Once

2 min readMay 6, 2021

The aim of this explainer💡 is to an examination of you can update all git branches with a single command.

There is git pull --all - but it fetches changes in all remote branches and then merges only the currently checked out one.
For an update of another branch, you need to check it out and merge changes

1. question

have 3 remote branches: master, staging and production — I have 3 local branches that track those remote branches.
updating all my local branches is tedious:

git fetch --all
git rebase origin/master
git checkout staging
git rebase origin/staging
git checkout production
git rebase origin/production

can you do this with git pull -all ?
it seems to do a fetch --all → then updates (fast forward or merges) the current working branch — but not the other local branches
i.e. you still have to manually switch to each local branch and update
this behavior of pull --all is exactly as expected (though not necessarily always useful)
the option is passed along to git fetch which then fetches all refs from all remotes, instead of just the needed one
it then merges (or in your case, rebases) the appropriate single branch.
if you want to check out other branches, you’re going to have to check them out.
and yes, merging (and rebasing) absolutely require a work tree → so they cannot be done without checking out the other branches
you could wrap up your described steps into a script/alias if you like, though I’d suggest joining the commands with && so that should one of them fail, it won’t try to plow on.

git pull --all>>> Fetch all remotes