Why does git say I need to push my commit when I have no local changes and then do a git pull?

Question

I have a git clone that is a couple of days old, so I wanted to pull the latest code down from the origin.

I have ZERO local changes.
I do the git pull and it tells me I need to push my merge commit. Why?

It should just merge the new files into my local branch and not ask me to do anything. I had NO local changes before the pull.

Answer 1

The two things which come to my mind are:

• Any "Untracked" changes which come from the environment will cause an issue like this (see: NPM installs or Compilation running locally).

• Sometimes a git environment will have a different line-ending encoding from your local system (often if the development moves between Windows and Linux machines it will do it). Depending on your Git client this could be obfuscated by the fact that some of them will hide whitespaces by default.

You can check both of those by running git diff and seeing if there is any output. If not and you are sure there are no changes you need to get you can do a git reset --hard and should be able to continue onward with the pull.

Answer 2

If you have a merge commit you did have some changes in your Git repository.

You have few options to verify the changes you made:

git whatchanged

• You can always use the command line and use the git whatchanged command. Full documentation can be found at https://git-scm.com/docs/git-whatchanged .

• This command supports many of the git log flags so you can use them as well

  

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git show

Git show will show you the content of the commit so you will be able to see the changes

Answer 3

If you're really sure that your files are not changed (not even in an unwanted way as supposed by answers) it may be that someone else changed the remote branch commit history with a force push, making your local branch diverging from the remote one.

If you're not afraid to lose something, you can reset your local branch to the remote one with

git fetch
git reset --hard origin/branchname

Otherwise, if you effectively added commits to your local branch, you can ask to git to download the remote branch and try to reapply your commits on top with git pull --rebase .