I cannot stand resolving merge conflicts. Vim, mergetool, or VSCode, I hate it all. This quick article shares a simple trick to avoid merge conflicts, and fix things as they break on a pull request.

The Situation

You can try this strategy if:

• You have an open pull request
• The upstream master branch made new commits
• The upstream repository expects a rebase workflow

The Steps

Start by syncing up your local master branch with the upstream branch, typically git pull upstream master while checked out on your master branch. Then git checkout <feature-branch>.

Assuming that the upstream branch was not working on a similar feature, most of the conflicts will be unrelated to your pull request. Occasionally the changes made on upstream will break some of your code, but I am of the opinion I would rather fix these situations on a case by case basis. To simply pull all the changes into your feature branch, you can use git rebase -Xours master. This will exclude,X, the changes on our feature branch, and just naively bring in everything from the remote tracking branch. I prefer getting my hands dirty within the editor to fix broken code that results from upstream changes.