Question

Suppose I was on master branch and created a new branch:

git checkout -b feature_branch

I started to work on feature_branch, and at some point I would like to merge my changes to master using rebase. So, I do:

# Get the latest code on master
git checkout master
git pull

# Rebase on master and push the most updated 'feature_branch'
git checkout feature_branch
git rebase master
git push

# Merge 'feature_branch' to 'master' and push the updated 'master'
git checkout master
git merge feature_branch
git push

# Back to work on 'feature_branch'
git checkout feature_branch

Is there a way to reduce the number of steps and achieve the same?

At the end of the process I would like master, origin/master, feature_branch, and origin/feature_branch, to point to the same commit.

Answer 1

You can remove a couple commands. This does the same:

# you have to have the branch checked out to pull, since pulling means merging
# into master, and you need a work tree to merge in
git checkout master
git pull

# no need to check out first; rebase does the right thing with two arguments
git rebase master feature_branch

git checkout master
git merge feature_branch

# git push by default pushes all branches that exist here and on the remote
git push

git checkout feature_branch

Strictly speaking, the merge into master is guaranteed to be a fast-forward (a trivial merge), so it doesn’t actually need a work tree, but there’s not really a built-in way skip the checkout. There are workarounds, e.g. pushing into the same repository: git push . feature_branch:master (safe, but weird) or directly updating the ref: git update-ref master feature_branch (unsafe – doesn’t check if it’s a fast-forward) but generally you might as well just quickly switch branches.

Also note that if you didn’t want to rebase the feature branch, you could just skip that, not rewrite feature_branch, and end up with a merge commit in master instead of the rebased feature_branch and fast-forward merge.