Rebasing Procedure¶
Given that teams work on different branches, while sharing common code that is updated on the main branch, conflicts and breakage may occur. If we consider team A developing the task A_task, which uses function x from the core source code. At some point, function x is updated, which will cause errors when A_task is merged into the main branch. To avoid that, we encourage rebasing your working branch to the main branch periodically. To do that, follow the following steps:
Before starting, we assume you are on your development branch. Check this with git status. Given this, then:
First commit all changes to your current branch
git add <files you have changed or added>
git commit -m "description of changes"
Then checkout the main branch, and pull to update main to the latest state.
git checkout main
git pull
If there is an error pulling the main branch try:
git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/main
Now that main is up to date, go back to your working branch:
git checkout -
# OR:
# git checkout <your_branchname>
And then start the interactive rebase:
git rebase -i main
This will prompt you with a list of your commits that should be added on top of main. Typically you can just accept the list that it finds.
If you have only updated code that hasn’t been touched by anyone else, then the reabse should happen smoothly with no issues.
Otherwise, it may be the case that conflicts exist. If they do use git status to determine which files
have conflicts and fix them. Edit them and search for ===== to find the sections with conflicts and resolve them.
Then git add the resolved files and run git rebase --continue. Repeat these steps until the rebase is finished.
If something goes wrong you can always git rebase --abort to return your branch to its previous state.
If the rebase does work smoothly the last thing to do is update your branch on the remote. Because the rebase copies your commits, you will need to overwrite the status of your branch on the remote by doing a force push:
git push --force
Now your code is rebased and on a branch on the git remote server.
Note: if you have your dev branch checked out across multiple machines / repos, other repo checkouts will have to force update to the new rebased branch head. This is done via checkout on your branch and running
git fetch
git reset --hard origin/<your_branchname>
Ensure you don’t have any changes as it will completely reset the state on that checkout to the state of the remote.
Reference tutorials: