A tutorial for understanding different merging methods.

Explicit Merge

checkout the develop branch:

git checkout develop

Because we want to do an explicit merge and there have been no changes to the develop branch since the feature/explicit-merge branch was created, use the ``--no-ff` flag so that the merge is not done with fast forward, but will create a merge commit.

Do an explicit merge of the feature/explicit-merge branch:

git merge feature/explicit-merge --no-ff

You may edit the merge commit statement in your editor or simply close it to accept the default statement.

Implicit Merge (Rebase and Fast Forward)

We are going to do a rebase merge, which is really doing a rebase and then a merge with fast forward.

git checkout feature/rebase-merge
git rebase develop
git checkout develop
git merge feature/rebase-merge

Squash Merge

We should still be on the develop branch. We are going to merge the feature/squash-merge branch by doing a merge with the --squash option, which will merge all of the changes from the feature/squash-merge branch.

git merge feature/squash-merge --squash

We then need to commit the changes.

git commit

By not including the -m with your commit command, you will be able to modify a draft commit message containing every message from your squashed commits before finalizing your commit.

Interactive Rebase

This is where I personally prefer to use a tool such as SourceTree to be able to better see what changes I'm making. You can do this purely from the command line, but be careful as you can introduce merge conflicts if you put commits in an order that git can't process. You can always run git rebase --abort to restore if you do get into trouble.

git checkout feature/rebase-i
git rebase -i SHA

You will need to enter the SHA of the parent commit of the first commit in your rebase.

Cherry Picking

Cherry picking is where you want to selectively include commits from one branch into your current branch. They be merged immediate with the original commit messages in place or the changes can be left uncommitted until committed later with a new commit message.

git checkout develop
git cherry-pick SHA

You will need to enter the SHA of the commit you want to cherry pick.

You can also use the --no-commit flag to add the changes without the original commit message or the --edit flag to allow you to edit the commit message before your commit is made.