Rebase a GitHub pull request on top of my newer local commits

Question

Suppose I am locally on the branch master of our blessed repository. Someone has sent in a pull request.

How do I apply the commits of that pull request on top of my local branch - as if those commits were rebased on my branch - in a single command?

Note: the pull request is several days old, and my local branch has new commits since the pull request has been created.

Answer 1

There's a great blog post on the subject, from Igor Zevaka

You first have to fetch the hidden pull request ref, and place it under the pr/NNN remote branch:

git fetch origin refs/pull/1234/head:refs/remotes/pr/1234

(replace 1234 by the pull request number)

After this it's just a classical rebase: checkout the pull request, and rebase it on your master branch:

git checkout pr/1234
git rebase master

or alternatively

git rebase master pr/1234

You might of course see conflicts.

Now the pull request is rebased on master , and is the current branch. If you want to update master just merge the pull request (we say --ff-only because we know it'll be a fast-forward merge):

git checkout master
git merge --ff-only pr/1234

To have a one-liner some shell aliasing is required, it's just a matter of scripting :)

Answer 2

OK, this one-liner will rebase your commits on top of the pull request (which is the inverse of what you want; see my other answer):

git pull --rebase origin pull/NNN/head

Where NNN is the pull request number. This assumes origin is your Github remote on your local repo, and master is checked out.

Explanation here on Douglas Stuarts' blog: Github stores pull requests from other forks in your origin repo, under pull/NNN . This is what allows to run pull --rebase on it.

Answer 3

Install hub

# directly apply all commits from a pull request to the current branch
$ git am -3 https://github.com/github/hub/pull/134

TODO: need to figure out how to force a --rebase