How do I make my local git reflect master in Github?

Question

I don't think I'm even asking this right. Here is my situation.

I have a local repository with master and dev branches. Same thing on Github.

Another developer created a branch and pushed it to the Github, and then created a pull request. I merged this pull request into master on Github.

Locally, I did a git pull and my local master updated. However, now my dev branches on both local and Github don't have the change from that pull request.

I would like to make dev start all over from master . I basically spend 95% of my time in this dev branch and if I want to fire up a Rails console locally I want it to work as expected.

How do I do this (and what's it called)?

Answer 1

They are separate branches from Master, thus why they don't have the changes on Master.

Typically what you would do is now merge your master branch in with your dev branch. There could be merge conflicts that you will have to resolve.

I am assuming that you want to keep your changes in dev but just add the stuff in master until you are ready to also push to master.

If you

git checkout dev
git merge master

Here is the basic branching and merging tutorial https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching-and-Merging

And here is one from atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/using-branches/git-merge

Answer 2

Keep in mind that Git versioning only goes forward. Once you approve a PR to master , then master is at the latest point in the flow. If you want to incororpate these changes into dev , all you need to do is swap to the dev branch and then merge master into it:

git checkout dev
git merge master

Pulling the changes from master to dev is common practice after a release. However, in theory, there should never be any changes in master that don't exist in dev , as both hotfix branches and release branches should be merged into dev directly.

Feature branches in themselves should only go out to dev , with dev ultimately carrying those feature branch changes to master through means of a release branch.

Urgent changes can indeed be planned for master , though these should be created as a hotfix branch which gets merged into both dev and master .

This follows the process know as Git Flow , which has the following illustrated flow from top-to-bottom (and I would strongly recommend following):