After Pull Request, “Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by N commits”

Question

Target

I want my local master to be matched with origin/master , as they have the same code.

Background

I'm not new to git , but I am new to Pull Requests and working into a team of developers.

We have 2 main branches: master and pre . We use Jira to create new branches, associated to features or incidents.

Our git flow is as follows:

1. Open a branch from pre (using Jira)
2. Code into branch
3. Create a Pull Request to merge back to pre (reviewed)
4. Again PR to merge to master (reviewed). We are in the process to implement some testing stage in pre , but right now is an empty step. So, once your new PR is approved goes from new-branch to pre , and without further reviews from pre to master .

What I did yesterday

So, I git checkout feature-branch in my local environment, made some modifications, git commit and git push origin feature-branch . The code was already on the remote repo, on Github.

I went to Github and created a PR (from Github website), assigning a reviewer. The reviewer approved it so I went to Github and clicked Merge button. Repeated this twice branch >> pre >> master , due to the mentioned reason.

Today, the issue

I want to work in another task. From my master branch in my local environment when I git pull origin master , I get this message:

From https://github.com/<user>/<reponame>
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up-to-date.

And git status outputs this:

# On branch master
# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 5 commits.
#   (use "git push" to publish your local commits)
#
nothing to commit, working directory clean

The first time I pulled, modifications were pulled from origin/master, but now this message gets appearing.

This repo has been used only by me these last days, so the code is exactly the same.

The questions

I didn't merge the code locally from feature-branch to pre to master . Should I?

What is happening here and how can I solve it?

PS: I read many answers but most of the Q/A are related to working on a local branch, not pushing the code to remote repo, which throws the same message.

Answer 1

Git fetch is what needed to be done here to update the refs.

From git fetch Documentation:

Fetch branches and/or tags (collectively, "refs") from one or more other repositories, along with the objects necessary to complete their histories. Remote-tracking branches are updated (see the description of below for ways to control this behavior).

Basically it means that git will collect all the meta-data about the commits from remote repo and save it on your local repo,without modifying any files.