Handling a Git Pull request with merge conflict

Written on June 23, 2017

When working with Git, the relatively complex tasks are issuing a pull request and then merging with conflicts. Due to the prevalence of UIs, pull requests are now quite simple. However, merge requests that have a conflict are a little bit more hard to handle. Here’s how I get this done.

In this example, let’s work with 2 branches:

• prod (the final source of truth)
• feature-1 (the branch issuing pull request)

Step 1: Verify your local repo

To start off, ensure that you have the latest files for the prod branch.

git checkout prod
git pull origin prod

This will ensure that the files on local repository are in-sync with your remote git repo (Github/Bitbucket, etc).

Step 2: Switch to branch

The next step is to switch to the branch that you want to merge. While doing it, ensure that you also pull the latest files from your remote server.

git checkout feature-1
git pull origin feature-1

Step 3: Try to merge

At this point, we have the latest files for both the “prod” and “feature-1” branch locally. You are also on the branch that needs to be merged. Now try this branch to your target branch/master.

git merge prod

You should see output like this:

Auto-merging origin_settings.py
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in origin_settings.py
Auto-merging aggregator.py
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

So git is saying that:

• File aggregator.py has some change but, it can be merged with no conflict.
• File origin_settings.py has some changes that overlap. There is a merge conflict and it cannot automatically merge the change.

Git would have also tried to merge the files and added the conflict related information to the file that has issues. In this case, it is a file named origin_settings.py.

Step 4: Resolve the merge conflict

To resolve the conflict, open the file and look for lines like this:

	data = open('cert2.txt').read()
	cert = TLSCertificate()
	<<<<<< HEAD
	print cert.loadCertificate(data)
	====== prod
	# print "hello world"

In this case, git says that the line to print “Hello world” from prod branch was over-written with a different print statement in the branch. Manually, you’ll need to fix this. So in my case, I fixed it this way:

	data = open('cert2.txt').read()
	cert = TLSCertificate()	
	print cert.loadCertificate(data)	

Step 5: Check in changes

Now, commit the fixes to the branch.

git add origin_settings.py
git commit -m "some comment"
git push origin feature-1

Step 6: Merge the branch

At this point, the conflicts should be gone. You can now log in to your remote server like github or bitbucket and hit the merge request. Once this completes, the pull request is automatically marked as complete.

When completing the merge, there is an option to close the branch as well. Use this option if you feel that the branch created is no longer necessary.

Hope you find this useful!