How to fix Git error: There is no tracking information for the current branch.

When performing an operation like git pull, git push, git fetch, etc, without specifying the remote or the branch involved in the operation, you should first make sure that the current branch has a corresponding upstream.

Depending on how the push.default config is set, you may encounter the following error.

# attempt to pull while the current branch 
# does not track any upstream branch
$ git pull
There is no tracking information for the current branch.
Please specify which branch you want to merge with.
See git-pull(1) for details.

    git pull <remote> <branch>

If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with:

    git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<branch> master2

In order to set an upstream branch you can use the --set-upstream-to option, or the shorthand version -u.

$ git push -u origin master
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
To https://url-to-remote-origin
 * [new branch]      master -> master
Branch 'master' set up to track remote branch 'master' from 'origin'.

This operation makes sure that the local master branch tracks the remote master branch. We can now pull without specifying the branch remote branch to pull from:

$ git pull
remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 328 bytes | 164.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://url-to-remote-origin
   c29db9a..6283d29  master    -> origin/master
Updating c29db9a..6283d29
Fast-forward
 README | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Here's the Full Official Documentation on branching and remotes in Git.

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How to fix Git error: There is no tracking information for the current branch.