For https://github.com-based projects, I most often just fetch upstream/master and branch from FETCH_HEAD to create topic branches, but occasionally I like to keep my local and origin/master branches up to date:

git pull -p --ff-only upstream master
git push # assumes local master is tracking origin/master
git fetch -p

In bash and https://github.com/powershell/powershell 7 I can do this in a single line separating commands with &&, but it’s a lot to type over and over. Shells’ history only lasts so long. Instead, I was able to combine this into a command alias in ~/.gitconfig:

git config --global alias.sync "!git pull -p --ff-only upstream master && git push origin master && git fetch -p origin"

Now, I can just run the following:

git sync

Edits

  • 2020-07-30: updated command line to be more explicit. See gist for latest.