Check out one additional branch in bitbucket pipeline

Tim Dery

In a pipeline step, I want to check out one more branch than the branch the pipeline is running on (the main branch).

I found the "clone: depth: full" option, which works.

However, that grabs all the branches in the repo, which takes additional time getting things that I don't need, especially if there's a lot of branches.

Is there a way to check out exactly one additional branch in a pipeline?

 

Tim Dery

I answered my own question with help from https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-questions/Bitbucket-pipelines-Checkout-a-different-branch-than-master/qaq-p/2220686

You can't just check out another branch from a pipeline. A `git branch -a` shows that the default pipeline's git only knows about the branch it's running on:

git branch -a
* my-branch
remotes/origin/my-branch

If you try to check out any other branch, it errors out because git doesn't know about any other branch.

If you run

git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"

Then

git fetch

git will see all of the branches and you can check them out etc

For my specific case, this isn't what I want, as it's pulling info on all the branches, which is effectively the same as a "clone depth:full" - it takes time to get all that info depending on the number of branches.

However, if I do

git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/main:refs/remotes/origin/main"

and

git fetch

then git can see the branch it's running on and branch main:

git branch -a
* my-branch
remotes/origin/main
remotes/origin/my-branch

which I'm then able to use in my pipeline.