💡 How to Pull Updates for All Git Branches Without Switching Manually

When working on multiple local branches (say for different client tasks, features, or experiments), you often:

• Switch to a branch using git checkout
• Pull the latest changes using git pull
• Repeat this for every other branch

That’s fine for 2-3 branches. But what if you have 10, 20, or even 30?

“There has to be a better way.”

Spoiler: There is.

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🛠️ The Goal

We want to pull the latest changes from the remote for every local branch without manually checking each one out.

Let’s automate that!

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Step-by-Step Solution

Here’s how to pull updates for all branches at once:

Step 1: List All Local Branches

git branch

This gives you a list like:

  main
* feature/login
  bugfix/footer
  refactor/api

Great — but we want to loop through these branches.

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Step 2: Loop Through Branches and Pull

Here’s a handy Bash script that does the job:

#!/bin/bash

current_branch=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)

for branch in $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' refs/heads/); do
  echo "🔄 Checking out $branch..."
  git checkout "$branch" > /dev/null 2>&1

  echo "⬇️ Pulling latest changes for $branch..."
  git pull --rebase

  echo "✅ Done with $branch"
  echo "-------------------------"
done

# Switch back to original branch
git checkout "$current_branch" > /dev/null 2>&1
echo "🚀 All done! Back on $current_branch"

Save this script as git-pull-all.sh and make it executable:

chmod +x git-pull-all.sh

Run it with:

./git-pull-all.sh

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• The script uses --rebase instead of a plain pull to keep history clean. You can remove it if you prefer merge commits.
• Works best if all branches are tracking remote ones (e.g. origin/main, origin/feature/login etc.).
• If you use authentication (like SSH keys or PATs), make sure you're authenticated before running the script.