Git: Resolve Conflicts in PR

What to do when GitHub does not allows you to merge a Pull Request due to conflicts!

First of all, rebase often to avoid this problem in most cases.

Sharing bits from my experience. The solutions that worked for me are:

1. git rebase

See documentation.

The best way is to do it locally using terminal or command prompt. Lets say you raised a PR from origin/develop to upstream/develop branch and got conflict. Go to your command prompt, rebase master onto develop and push to develop branch. PR should get resolved.

But this won’t work when the tips are just big time outdated.

• I tried rebasing, and all I ended up was at same state but with alternated branches. Means the new branch was now compatible with master but not develop.
• I also tried using GitHub’s web editor (link was present in PR comment near conflicting files), this also did not work, as after resolving, GitHub repeatedly asked me to Start Over.

That’s when git merge came to rescue.

2. git merge

See documentation.

Assuming, you are raising PR from your origin to another remote called upstream, perform the following in your local terminal or command prompt.

git checkout develop 

git fetch upstream 

git merge upstream/develop

Resolve any conflicts and commit. The run below to check if branch is clean now.

git status

Once confirmed, execute.

git push origin develop

And then, raise PR from origin/develop to upstream/develop. You should be able to merge it now.

3. Force push

Use this option if and only if you are sole owner of upstream and are confident that you’ve got all commits in your origin/develop.

Force Push overwrites target branch with your pushed commits, and you won’t be able to reclaim whats lost in the process.

git push origin develop 

git checkout -b develop upstream/develop 

git reset --hard origin/develop 

git push upstream +develop

Note: origin and upstream are just regular remotes, former is your own remote repository and upstream represents the base repository from which you have forked your’s. For example,

upstream -> https://github.com/microsoft/msoffice 

origin -> https://github.com/rajdeep/msoffice

Thats it! I hope it helps. Let me know in comments if this worked or you have some other scenario or solution.