3.2 push, pull, and fetch

Remote collaboration depends on one key idea: your local repository and the remote repository are not live-synced. You explicitly send and receive commits.

push: send local commits out

git push

git push sends commits that already exist locally to the remote repository. It does not create commits for you, so you usually commit before pushing.

fetch: download remote information only

git fetch

fetch downloads new commit information from remote branches, but does not directly change your current working branch. It is useful when you want to inspect what happened remotely first.

pull: download and integrate

git pull

You can roughly understand pull as fetch plus an integration step. The integration may be merge, or rebase depending on configuration.