04-conflicts.md

Conflicts

What are conflicts, and how do they happen?

Conflicts in git occur when trying to integrate changes from two different states, where different changes are made in one place. The most common case is when performing a merge of one branch into another, where there's a change to a particular line in a particular file on both sides of the merge.

Git doesn't know what to do automatically, so it just stops in the middle of the action, and asks you to intervene.

Practical One

First, let's make a new branch and add a file:

git checkout -b left master

echo "Left is the best" > conflict.txt

git add conflict.txt
git commit -m "Left is the best"

Next, for the purposes of demonstration, let's create another branch, called right:

git checkout -b right master

echo "Right is the best" > conflict.txt
git add conflict.txt
git commit -m "Right is the best"

We've made changes here in the same file, in two separate branches. If we try to integrate these branches with a merge, we're going to see a conflict. Let's merge the-left into the-right to see a conflict:

git merge left

We now are told that there has been a conflict while perfoming the merge. Git has stopped the merge process and asked us to resolve the conflict before continuing. We can check the status of our repo to see the unmerged paths and instructions on how to resolve the conflict.

git status

Let's open 'conflict.txt' in an editor and go through how to resolve a conflict. This is the content of our file:

<<<<<<< HEAD
Right is the best
=======
Left is the best
>>>>>>> left

What are the components of this block? This block is saying that the version of the change in HEAD (right branch) is above the '=======' and everything below it is the change in the branch named 'left'. We can choose to keep one of these changes, keep both, or change the content to something different.

Let's update the contents of the file to:

Right and Left are both equally good

With our conflict manually resolved, we need to git add:

# Stage our change and mark conflict as resolved
git add conflict.txt

Lets check our git status once more.

git status

It tells us that all the conflicts have been resolved, but we are still in the merging process. Finally, commit the integrated change. This will prompt for a commit message. Leaving the default message is fine.

git commit

Diving deeper

Aborting a merge

We can abort a merge that's in progress by using the git merge --abort command.

Minimising merge conflicts

To minimise merge conflicts keep commits small and integrate changes often.