Git - Automatically fast forward all tracking branches on pull

Shell script that fast-forwards all branches that have their upstream branch set to the matching origin/ branch without doing any checkouts

• it doesn't change your current branch at any time, no need to deal with working copy changes and time lost checking out

• it only does fast-forwards, branches that cannot be fast-forwarded will show an error message and will be skipped

Make sure all your branches' upstream branches are set correctly by running git branch -vv. Set the upstream branch with git branch -u origin/yourbanchname

Copy-paste into a file and chmod 755:

#!/bin/sh

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

for branch in $(git for-each-ref refs/heads --format="%(refname:short)"); do
        upbranch=$(git config --get branch.$branch.merge | sed 's:refs/heads/::');
        if [ "$branch" = "$upbranch" ]; then
                if [ "$branch" = "$curbranch" ]; then
                        echo Fast forwarding current branch $curbranch
                        git merge --ff-only origin/$upbranch
                else
                        echo Fast forwarding $branch with origin/$upbranch
                        git fetch . origin/$upbranch:$branch
                fi
        fi
done;

If you really want to fast forward all local branches that are tracking remote branches you might want to consider adding this as an alias to your ~/.gitconfig:

[alias]
    pull-all = !"for b in $(git for-each-ref refs/heads --format='%(refname)') ; do git checkout ${b#refs/heads/} ; git pull --ff-only ; done"

You can then run git pull-all, it will iterate through your local branches and run a git pull --ff-only on each.