Merge conflicts

When merging two branches it’s not very incommon to have conflicts, a conflict means two branches getting merged have two different versions of a file for example and git doesn’t know which one to keep.

Therefore when we get a conflict we need to fix it in order to merge properly, but how is that?

When git generates a conflict, it writes “special characters” in the content of file to specify the problem, to resolve the conflict we remove the special syntax, and keep the changes made by the feature branch if we want to keep it, save the modified file, add it to the staging area, commit it, and then try mergin again.

Introduction to remotes

Remote repos are repos that are in the cloud this repos has many benefits like :

Work is backed up
Teams can collaborate on the same project

Companies can choose to not host their repos on the cloud if they have strict privacy rules regarding data.

Cloning repos

Cloning local repos

git clone path/to/project

We can also give it a name like this :

git clone path/to/project new_repo_name

Cloning remote repos

git clone URL_of_repo

When cloning remote repos git remembers where the original was, we can list all remotes associated with the repo like this :

git remote

or if we want to the result to be more detailed or “verbose”:

git remote -v

By default git will name the remote repo origin, we can name the remote ourselves by using this command :

git remote add <name of remote repo> URL

Example :

git remote add hmed https://github.com/hmed/repo

Pulling from remotes

Fetching from the origin remote to our local repo:

git fetch origin

This :

Doesn’t merge the remote repo contents into our local repo
It might add new branches that are present in the remote but not in the local
It fetches ALL branches

If we want to fetch a single remote branch :

git fetch origin main

To synchronize content after fetching, we use :

git merge origin

This merges origin with our current local branch

The pull command is more convenient it simplifies the operation by fetching and merging “at the same time”

git pull origin

As fetch we can pull a single branch from the remote :

git pull origin dev

Pushing to remotes

To push changes to our remote repo from our local repo we use :

git push remote local

Example :

git push origin main

In a typical workflow we first pull changes from the remote repo, work on our changes locally, save, commit and then push to the remote repo, if we don’t pull first we might encounter an error when pushing stating that our local repo is behind and we need to pull from the remote before pushing.