• 131
• 255
• 14

Rolling git merge back to normal

by bernt & torsten

I have been using git for a while and I messed up a few times, especially on what branch I’m on and merging branches. The other day, I had checked out a branch and did some changes to my code, when I was done I wanted to merge the changes to the master.

I changed the branch to master, when I tried to go back to my dev-branch it gave me an error

$ git checkout dev-branch
wp-content/plugins/advanced-custom-fields-pro/admin/views/settings-export.php needs merge
wp-content/plugins/advanced-custom-fields-pro/assets/inc/select2/select2_locale_no.js needs merge
error: you need to resolve your current index first

I poked around a bit on the net, and finally found a way out of my problem. I ended up doing the following. I rolled back the merge that I was trying to do with:

git reset --merge

This will remove your merge, and if this is not for you, you should resolve those merge conflicts.

After this, I was able to checkout my dev-branch

What I did next was to merge my dev-branch into master but exactly keep the versions of the files in the dev-branch. That was done the following way.

# Switch to the topic branch:
git checkout dev-branch

# Create a merge commit, which looks as if it's merging in from master, but is
# actually discarding everything from the master branch and keeping everything
# from dev-branch:
git merge -s ours master

# Switch back to the master branch:
git checkout master

# Merge the dev-branch into master - this should now be a fast-forward
# that leaves you with master exactly as dev-branch was:
git merge dev-branch

This solved the problem I had, and I hope this will help you out as well.

Want to learn more about git and branches – checkout these articles:
A successful Git branching model
Git Branching – Basic Branching and Merging