Git merge after fetch - how, exactly?

git git-merge git-fetch
Major Productions picture Major Productions · Jan 25, 2013 · Viewed 25.6k times · Source

I've read from various sources that it's usually a better idea to fetch then merge rather than simply pull as it allows for finer control. That said, I've yet to find actually how to do it. Case in point:

There was a small change made to some of the code in one of my GitHub repository's master branch. I was able to fetch it, but I don't know how to actually merge the differences in with my local master branch. git branch lists all of the local branches I have, but nothing indicating anything to merge to.

So, is it just something like git merge master or git merge origin/master? What am I missing?

Answer

Carl Norum picture Carl Norum · Jan 25, 2013

git merge origin/master should work. Since master is usually a tracking branch, you could also do git pull from that branch and it will do a fetch & merge for you.

If you have local changes on your master that aren't reflected on origin, you might want git rebase origin/master to make sure your commits are 'on top'.

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