Q:

Git pull origin keeps returning "Already up to date"

I've been messing with this for like 2 days now and I'm not fully understanding the Git process yet and how I am supposed to deploy from github to production server.  
Since it's a laravel website, what I did was first install a clean laravel installation on production, then added a git remote for the github repository.   But when I try to do a git pull origin or git pull origin master, it keeps saying Already up-to-date. 
Then I tried doing:
git checkout origin/master -b master2
But got the following error:
The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
_laravel/.env.example
_laravel/.gitattributes
_laravel/.gitignore
_laravel/app/Commands/Command.php
_laravel/app/Console/Commands/Inspire.php
_laravel/app/Console/Kernel.php
_laravel/app/Events/Event.php
_laravel/app/Exceptions/Handler.php
_laravel/app/Handlers/Commands/.gitkeep
_laravel/app/Handlers/Events/.gitkeep
_laravel/app/Http/Controllers/Controller.php
_laravel/app/Http/Controllers/WelcomeController.php
_laravel/app/Http/Kernel.php
_laravel/app/Http/Middleware/Authenticate.php
_laravel/app/Http/Middleware/RedirectIfAuthenticated.php
_laravel/app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php
_laravel/app/Http/Requests/Request.php
_laravel/app/Http/routes.php
_laravel/app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php
_laravel/app/Providers/BusServiceProvider.php
_laravel/app/Providers/ConfigServiceProvider.php
_laravel/app/Providers/EventServiceProvider.php
_laravel/app/Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php

So I guess I need to take everything from the repository and pull it to production server and force it to overwrite whatever is there now. 

A:

When you want to install an application on your server with git, you always start with making a clone of your repository into an empty folder.  By adding a .,  you can make a clone in your current directory.  Otherwise, a new directory will be created.  
You might decide to install your dependencies with composer on your production server.  Then you make sure the vendormap is in your .gitignore.  Then you can use composer install to load the dependencies, based on the composer-files you loaded with git.