Git – I ran into a merge conflict. How to abort the merge

gitgit-mergegit-merge-conflictversion control

I used git pull and had a merge conflict:

unmerged:   _widget.html.erb

You are in the middle of a conflicted merge.

I know that the other version of the file is good and that mine is bad so all my changes should be abandoned. How can I do this?

Best Answer

Since your pull was unsuccessful then HEAD (not HEAD^) is the last "valid" commit on your branch:

git reset --hard HEAD

The other piece you want is to let their changes over-ride your changes.

Older versions of git allowed you to use the "theirs" merge strategy:

git pull --strategy=theirs remote_branch

But this has since been removed, as explained in this message by Junio Hamano (the Git maintainer). As noted in the link, instead you would do this:

git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin

Related Solutions

Git – Undoing a git rebase

The easiest way would be to find the head commit of the branch as it was immediately before the rebase started in the reflog...

git reflog

and to reset the current branch to it (with the usual caveats about being absolutely sure before reseting with the --hard option).

Suppose the old commit was HEAD@{2} in the ref log:

git reset --hard HEAD@{2}

In Windows, you may need to quote the reference:

git reset --hard "HEAD@{2}"

You can check the history of the candidate old head by just doing a git log HEAD@{2} (Windows: git log "HEAD@{2}").

If you've not disabled per branch reflogs you should be able to simply do git reflog branchname@{1} as a rebase detaches the branch head before reattaching to the final head. I would double check this, though as I haven't verified this recently.

Per default, all reflogs are activated for non-bare repositories:

[core]
    logAllRefUpdates = true

Git – How to resolve merge conflicts in a Git repository

Try: git mergetool

It opens a GUI that steps you through each conflict, and you get to choose how to merge. Sometimes it requires a bit of hand editing afterwards, but usually it's enough by itself. It is much better than doing the whole thing by hand certainly.

As per Josh Glover's comment:

The command

doesn't necessarily open a GUI unless you install one. Running git mergetool for me resulted in vimdiff being used. You can install one of the following tools to use it instead: meld, opendiff, kdiff3, tkdiff, xxdiff, tortoisemerge, gvimdiff, diffuse, ecmerge, p4merge, araxis, vimdiff, emerge.

Below is the sample procedure to use vimdiff for resolve merge conflicts. Based on this link

Step 1: Run following commands in your terminal

git config merge.tool vimdiff
git config merge.conflictstyle diff3
git config mergetool.prompt false

This will set vimdiff as the default merge tool.

Step 2: Run following command in terminal

git mergetool

Step 3: You will see a vimdiff display in following format

  ╔═══════╦══════╦════════╗
  ║       ║      ║        ║
  ║ LOCAL ║ BASE ║ REMOTE ║
  ║       ║      ║        ║
  ╠═══════╩══════╩════════╣
  ║                       ║
  ║        MERGED         ║
  ║                       ║
  ╚═══════════════════════╝

These 4 views are

LOCAL – this is file from the current branch

BASE – common ancestor, how file looked before both changes

REMOTE – file you are merging into your branch

MERGED – merge result, this is what gets saved in the repo

You can navigate among these views using ctrl+w. You can directly reach MERGED view using ctrl+w followed by j.

More information about vimdiff navigation is here and here.

Step 4. You could edit the MERGED view the following way

If you want to get changes from REMOTE

:diffg RE

If you want to get changes from BASE

:diffg BA

If you want to get changes from LOCAL

:diffg LO

Step 5. Save, Exit, Commit and Clean up

:wqa save and exit from vi

git commit -m "message"

git clean Remove extra files (e.g. *.orig) created by diff tool.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – Undoing a git rebase

Git – How to resolve merge conflicts in a Git repository

Related Topic