Rebasing remote branches in Git

Question

I am using an intermediate Git repository to mirror a remote SVN repository  from which people can clone and work on  The intermediate repository has it s master branch rebased nightly from the upstream SVN  and we are working on feature branches  For example   remote    master  local    master   feature   I can successfully push my feature branch back to the remote  and end up with what I expect   remote    master   feature  local    master   feature   I then re-setup the branch to track the remote   remote    master   feature  local    master   feature - gt  origin feature   And all is well  What I would like to do from here is to rebase the feature branch to the master branch on the remote  but I would like to do this from my local machine  I d like to be able to do   git checkout master git pull git checkout feature git rebase master git push origin feature   To keep the remote feature branch up-to-date with the remote master  However  this method causes Git to complain   To  lt remote gt      rejected         feature - gt  feature  non-fast-forward  error  failed to push some refs to   lt remote gt   To prevent you from losing history  non-fast-forward updates were rejected Merge the remote changes  e g   git pull   before pushing again   See the  Note about fast-forwards  section of  git push --help  for details    git pull does the trick but causes a merge commit that I d like to avoid  I m concerned that the message states feature - gt  feature rather than feature - gt  origin feature but this may just be a presentation thing    Am I missing something  or going about this in completely the wrong way  It s not critical to avoid doing the rebase on the remote server  but it makes fixing any merge conflicts from the rebase much harder

User · Accepted Answer

It comes down to whether the feature is used by one person or if others are working off of it.

You can force the push after the rebase if it's just you:

git push origin feature -f

However, if others are working on it, you should merge and not rebase off of master.

git merge master
git push origin feature

This will ensure that you have a common history with the people you are collaborating with.

On a different level, you should not be doing back-merges. What you are doing is polluting your feature branch's history with other commits that don't belong to the feature, making subsequent work with that branch more difficult - rebasing or not.

This is my article on the subject called branch per feature.

Hope this helps.

User · Answer

Nice that you brought this subject up   This is an important thing concept in git that a lof of git users would benefit from knowing  git rebase is a very powerful tool and enables you to squash commits together  remove commits etc  But as with any powerful tool  you basically need to know what you re doing or something might go really wrong   When you are working locally and messing around with your local branches  you can do whatever you like as long as you haven t pushed the changes to the central repository  This means you can rewrite your own history  but not others history  By only messing around with your local stuff  nothing will have any impact on other repositories   This is why it s important to remember that once you have pushed commits  you should not rebase them later on  The reason why this is important  is that other people might pull in your commits and base their work on your contributions to the code base  and if you later on decide to move that content from one place to another  rebase it  and push those changes  then other people will get problems and have to rebase their code  Now imagine you have 1000 developers    It just causes a lot of unnecessary rework

User · Answer

You can disable the check  if you re really sure you know what you re doing  by using the --force option to git push

User · Answer

Because you rebased feature on top of the new master  your local feature is not a fast-forward of origin feature anymore  So  I think  it s perfectly fine in this case to override the fast-forward check by doing git push origin  feature  You can also specify this in your config   git config remote origin push  refs heads feature refs heads feature   If other people work on top of origin feature  they will be disturbed by this forced update  You can avoid that by merging in the new master into feature instead of rebasing  The result will indeed be a fast-forward

[git] Rebasing remote branches in Git

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