Git Branches When Shallow Cloning

Short but sweet: you have a shallow git clone like git clone --depth 1 ... and now you want to access another branch. It's not very clear how to do this, but this is the trick: git fetch --depth 1 origin branch:branch That's it. If you don't use the branch:branch syntax, it will fetch the branch contents at your desired depth, but the branch will never actually be created locally so you can't switch to it. Weird!