Avoid unwanted merge commits and other commits when doing pull request on GitHub

Question

I forked a project on Github.

Let the remote upstream be upstream and my remote repository be origin. My local master branch is se

Answer 1

Instead of merging you want to rebase. You can do this manually, or automatically when pulling.

git pull --rebase upstream master
git push --force origin master

Once you've started doing merges though this will get hard to do, you'll need to reset the branch back to before you did a merge commit.