Git error on commit after merge - fatal: cannot do a partial commit during a merge

Question

I ran a git pull that ended in a conflict. I resolved the conflict and everything is fine now (I used mergetool also).

When I commit the resolved file

Answer 1

Looks like you missed -m for commit command

Answer 2

1. go to your project directory
   2. display hidden files (.git folder will appear)
   3. open .git folder
   4. remove MERGE_HEAD
   5. commit again
   6. if git told you that git is locked go back to .git folder and remove index.lock
   7. commit again everything will work fine this time .

Answer 3

You probably got a conflict in something that you haven't staged for commit. git won't let you commit things independently (because it's all part of the merge, I guess), so you need to git add that file and then git commit -m "Merge conflict resolution". The -i flag for git commit does the add for you.

Answer 4

As the error message says you cannot do a partial commit after a merge. Instead of committing just file.php you should commit all the changes.

This should work.

git commit -m "Fixing merge" 

Answer 5

If you are using Source tree or other GUI ensure all files are checked (after merge).

Answer 6

git commit -i -m 'merge message' didn't work for me. It said:

fatal: No paths with --include/--only does not make sense.

FWIW, I got here via this related question because I was getting this message:

fatal: You have not concluded your merge (MERGE_HEAD exists).

I also tried mergetool, which said No files need merging. Very confusing! So the MERGE_HEAD is not in a file that needs merging-??

Finally, I used this trick to add only the modified files (did not want to add all the files in my tree, since I have some I want to keep untracked):

git ls-files -m | xargs git add

Then I was finally (!) able to commit and push up. It sure would be nice if git gave you better hints about what to do in these situations.