Question

My shop has a goofy setup where one person code reviews and pushes, while everyone else pulls, makes changes locally, then sends changes to the one guy for review and then push.

We all keep two local branches, “main” and “work” (“main” is static and we work in “work”).

I need to know how execute the following steps:
1) Replace my “main” with the origin
2) Merge my changes from “work” into the newly updated “main”
3) Copy “main” back into “work”

The steps can be in any order, but I need to accomplish the basic idea of keeping up-to-date and working locally. I’ve been reading over the documentation, but I’m terrified to make a mistake. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

First, you shouldn’t be terrified of making a mistake. Set up some test repositories and see how things work before you work with your production code.

Replace my “main” with the origin

Assuming that your local main branch matches a remote main branch, you should simply be able to:

git checkout main
git pull

This will bring your local branch up-to-date with the remote branch.

Merge my changes from “work” into the newly updated “main” and Copy “main” back into “work”

You said earlier that you don’t make any changes to your “main” branch.

Having imported remote changes into your local main branch, you would merge them into your work branch like this:

git checkout work
git merge main

This is a pretty typical workflow: you would see something almost exactly like this if you were tracking code from an upstream source and maintaining a local set of patches.