Question

When using Git, I often find myself doing the following when working in master:

# work work work...
$ git checkout -b temp
$ git commit -a -m 'more work done'
$ git checkout master
$ git pull origin master
# turns out master was updated since my previous pull
$ git checkout temp
# I don't want a merge commit for a simple bugfix
$ git rebase master
$ git checkout master
$ git merge temp
$ git push origin master
$ git branch -d temp

… and I get tired of doing this. Is there a way to do this dance without all of the checkouts, and preferably without (manually) creating the temporary branch?

Answer 1

If you don’t mind not creating a branch called temp, you could just do the following all on master:

git commit -a -m 'more work done'
git fetch origin
git rebase origin/master

… or equivalently:

git commit -a -m 'more work done'
git pull --rebase origin master

If you do want to keep the temp branch, however, you can still make this a bit shorter by not checking out master just to do the pull – you only need to fetch and then rebase your branch onto origin/master:

# work work work...
$ git checkout -b temp
$ git commit -a -m 'more work done'
$ git fetch origin
# It looks like origin/master was updated, so:
$ git rebase origin/master
# Then when you finally want to merge:
$ git checkout master
$ git merge temp
$ git push origin master
$ git branch -d temp

sehe’s answer reminds me that you could replace:

$ git fetch origin
$ git rebase origin/master

… with:

$ git pull --rebase origin master

… which is nearly equivalent. The difference is that when you run git fetch origin, all of your remote-tracking branches for origin will be updated, whereas when you pull a particular branch from origin, none of them are – it’s just the temporary ref FETCH_HEAD that is updated. I personally prefer running one extra command (git fetch origin), and seeing all the remote branches that have changed in the output.