How do I synchronize two branches in the same Git repository?

Question

Here\'s a common workflow hurdle I encounter often:

master is our \"stable\" branch

$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working         


        

Answer 1

If you don't need the branch around:

If you've merged foo back to master, "git branch -d foo" to kill the topic branch, and then "checkout -b foo" in the future when you need to hack on it again.

If you do need the branch around:

You can rebase your topic branch against the master branch:

git checkout foo
git rebase master

Or:

git rebase master foo

Answer 2

Rebasing is the process of moving or combining a sequence of commits to a new base commit. Rebasing is most useful and easily visualized in the context of a feature branching workflow. The general process can be visualized as the following:

The example below combines git rebase with git merge to maintain a linear project history. This is a quick and easy way to ensure that your merges will be fast-forwarded.

# Start a new feature
git checkout -b new-feature master
# Edit files
git commit -a -m "Start developing a feature"

In the middle of our feature, we realize there’s a security hole in our project

# Create a hotfix branch based off of master
git checkout -b hotfix master
# Edit files
git commit -a -m "Fix security hole"
# Merge back into master
git checkout master
git merge hotfix
git branch -d hotfix

After merging the hotfix into master, we have a forked project history. Instead of a plain git merge, we’ll integrate the feature branch with a rebase to maintain a linear history:

git checkout new-feature
git rebase master

This moves new-feature to the tip of master, which lets us do a standard fast-forward merge from master:

git checkout master
git merge new-feature

Taken from Atlassian Git Rebase Tutorial

Answer 3

I use the following to combine changes from two branches (mine and yours) and to synchronize both branches for continued work. This seems to be working. Does anyone see a problem with it?

git checkout mine # make sure I'm on my branch
git commit -a     # commit changes
git push origin mine  
git checkout yours # switch to your branch
git pull origin yours # get changes you've committed & pushed
git checkout mine 
git merge yours # merge your changes into mine
git push origin mine 
git checkout yours 
git rebase mine # set your branch to the merged result
git push origin yours # push the merged result up to your branch on origin
git checkout mine # get back to my branch