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This article will discuss resolving git mergeconflicts through git commands.

Overview

Git has many features which developers can use easily and solve their problems. Among these features of git, merging is the basic aspect that every developer needs when working on a single project in a large team.

It is the process of tying and branching history on a single repository. It helps us to link several commits into a single unified branch history in the repository.

Git merge conflicts

There are situations that developers face during conflicts in various commits; Merge conflicts occur when they merge their exact files and perform different tasks while merging.

This can also happen when developers update local repository files in multiple branches on the remote repository at the same time.

Merge conflicts occur when any updates or changes are made to the same file on both branches or when a single file conflicts with different team members' code at the same line.

After this conflict, git does not know which change to accept and which to reject. The developer then has to consciously resolve it because sometimes resolving it in the wrong way can cause serious problems in our project and delivery to our clients.

When working on a project, it can only be successfully completed with the support of teammates.

Use dry runs to avoid merge conflicts

We know that merge conflicts are common in developers’ daily lives; they face these issues from time to time. Despite this, developers try their best to resolve them as smoothly as possible to increase their productivity.

There are many ways to resolve a merge conflict, depending on the circumstances of the conflict. One way to resolve this issue is with the dry run option of the merge, which we will discuss in the following area.

Git merge test run

Git has many commands that take a dry run option. Developers use this to see what happens without applying it.

We can say that this is an option to verify what the git command is going to do before doing it. While merging, we can also confirm that there are no conflicts in this merge.

To do this, we will use the following command with two flags for a dry run:

git merge --no-commit --no-ff <branch>

In the above command, the flags --no-commit and --no-ff are used to tell git to perform the merge but not commit the result to the repository and not merge the commit with the previous commit.

If we commit and immediately realize we made a mistake, we can quickly revert it using the git reset command.