What is the best (and safest) way to merge a Git branch into master?

How I would do this

git checkout mastergit pull origin mastergit merge testgit push origin master

If I have a local branch from a remote one, I don't feel comfortable with merging other branches than this one with the remote. Also I would not push my changes, until I'm happy with what I want to push and also I wouldn't push things at all, that are only for me and my local repository. In your description it seems, that test is only for you? So no reason to publish it.

git always tries to respect yours and others changes, and so will --rebase. I don't think I can explain it appropriately, so have a look at the Git book - Rebasing or git-ready: Intro into rebasing for a little description. It's a quite cool feature

This is a very practical question, but all the answers above are not practical.

Like

git checkout mastergit pull origin mastergit merge testgit push origin master

This approach has two issues:

1. It's unsafe, because we don't know if there are any conflicts between test branch and master branch.

2. It would "squeeze" all test commits into one merge commit on master; that is to say on master branch, we can't see the all change logs of test branch.

So, when we suspect there would some conflicts, we can have following git operations:

git checkout testgit pull git checkout mastergit pullgit merge --no-ff --no-commit test

Test merge before commit, avoid a fast-forward commit by --no-ff,

If conflict is encountered, we can run git status to check details about the conflicts and try to solve

git status

Once we solve the conflicts, or if there is no conflict, we commit and push them

git commit -m 'merge test branch'git push

But this way will lose the changes history logged in test branch, and it would make master branch to be hard for other developers to understand the history of the project.

So the best method is we have to use rebase instead of merge (suppose, when in this time, we have solved the branch conflicts).

Following is one simple sample, for advanced operations, please refer to http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing

git checkout mastergit pullgit checkout testgit pullgit rebase -i mastergit checkout mastergit merge test

Yep, when you have uppers done, all the Test branch's commits will be moved onto the head of Master branch. The major benefit of rebasing is that you get a linear and much cleaner project history.

The only thing you need to avoid is: never use rebase on public branch, like master branch.

Never do operations like the following:

git checkout mastergit rebase -i test

Details for https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing/the-golden-rule-of-rebasing

appendix:

• if you are not sure about rebasing operations, please refer to: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing

Neither a rebase nor a merge should overwrite anyone's changes (unless you choose to do so when resolving a conflict).

The usual approach while developing is

git checkout mastergit pullgit checkout testgit log master.. # if you're curiousgit merge origin/test # to update your local test from the fetch in the pull earlier

When you're ready to merge back into master,

git checkout mastergit log ..test # if you're curiousgit merge testgit push

If you're worried about breaking something on the merge, git merge --abort is there for you.

Using push and then pull as a means of merging is silly. I'm also not sure why you're pushing test to origin.