Checkout or list remote branches in GitPython

For those who want to just print the remote branches:

# Execute from the repository root directory
repo = git.Repo('.')
remote_refs = repo.remote().refs

for refs in remote_refs:
    print(refs.name)

To list branches you can use:

from git import Repo
r = Repo(your_repo_path)
repo_heads = r.heads # or it's alias: r.branches

r.heads returns git.util.IterableList (inherits after list) of git.Head objects, so you can:

repo_heads_names = [h.name for h in repo_heads]

And to checkout eg. master:

repo_heads['master'].checkout() 
# you can get elements of IterableList through it_list['branch_name'] 
# or it_list.branch_name

Module mentioned in the question is GitPython which moved from gitorious to Github.

I had a similar issue. In my case I only wanted to list the remote branches that are tracked locally. This worked for me:

import git

repo = git.Repo(repo_path)
branches = []
for r in repo.branches:
    branches.append(r)
    # check if a tracking branch exists
    tb = t.tracking_branch()
    if tb:
        branches.append(tb) 

In case all remote branches are needed, I would prefer running git directly:

def get_all_branches(path):
    cmd = ['git', '-C', path, 'branch', '-a']
    out = subprocess.check_output(cmd, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
    return out

Just to make it obvious - to get a list of remote branches from the current repo directory:

import os, git

# Create repo for current directory
repo = git.Repo(os.getcwd())

# Run "git branch -r" and collect results into array
remote_branches = []
for ref in repo.git.branch('-r').split('\n'):
    print(ref)
    remote_branches.append(ref)

Basically, with GitPython, if you know how to do it within command line, but not within the API, just use repo.git.action("your command without leading 'git' and 'action'"), example: git log --reverse => repo.git.log('--reverse')

in this case https://stackoverflow.com/a/47872315/12550269

So I try this command:

repo = git.Repo()

repo.git.checkout('-b', local_branch, remote_branch)

this command can make a new local branch name local_branch(if already haved, rasie error) and set up to track remote branch remote_branch

it works very well!

I took a slightly different approach here, based on the desire to obtain a list of branches that can be checked out:

repo = git.Repo(YOUR_REPO_HERE)
branch_list = [r.remote_head for r in repo.remote().refs]

Unlike the answer using refs.name, this obtains the name without the remote prefix, in the form you would want to use to check out the repository.

Something to be aware of when listing remote branches is that your local git may not be automatically removing the remote branches it is tracking. This code illustrates the issue:

ls_remotes = git_repo.git.ls_remote(heads=True)
print(len(ls_remotes.split("\n")))

remote_references = [ref.name for ref in git_repo.remote().refs]
print(len(remote_references))

Unless you have pruned your remotes the first print will likely return more branches than the second.

If you want to ensure your local git does not have orphaned remote branches you can use either of these (or various config options):

git fetch --prune
git remote update --prune