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Once a pull request has passed review, it's time to merge it into your repo's primary branch.
More resources
GitHub has created a web app that's integrated with their platform called GitHub Learning Lab. It's a series of tutorials that will walk you through various operations on GitHub, including using branches to set up a GitHub Pages site for your project, and resolving merge conflicts in a pull request.
The excellent Pro Git book by Scott Chacon has a chapter dedicated to branches and merging. It's available to read online for free.
It can sometimes take hours or
even days to get a poll request review.
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During that time, others have probably
been making changes to the repo's master
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branch, changes that might
conflict with yours.
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You don't wanna be surprised by these
changes when you merge your topic
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branch into master.
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So first, it's a good idea to
merge master into your branch.
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If there are no conflicts, GitHub lets you
merge master into your branch at the click
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of a button, but
it looks like we have a conflict here.
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So we'll need to fix it
from the command line.
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So we'll go to our git
repo on our computer.
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And first we need to update the master
branch with any changes from
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the remote repo.
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So first, we're going to checkout
the master branch, git checkout master.
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Then we fetch changes and
merge them into master with git pull.
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There are no changes in this case, but
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if there had been, this would
ensure that we incorporate them.
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Now, we need to merge the changes for
master into our topic branch, so
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that we can resolve any conflicts.
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We check out the topic branch
with git checkout add-letters and
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we merge the changes from master end
of the topic branch, git merge master.
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Looks like there's a conflict to fix.
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Let's take care of that real quick.
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So it looks like we have some changes
both on the add letters branch and
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on the master's branch.
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We're going to go ahead and
keep both sets of changes in this case.
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I don't see any problems with them.
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So we'll save this and stage it,
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git add decoder.rb,
which will mark the conflicts as resolved.
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And then we'll commit it,
with just git commit.
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I won't use -m, so
that it uses the default message.
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I don't wanna change this message at all,
so I'm just gonna exit
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without making any changes, and
that completes the merge commit.
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As always, if you're merging code for an
app, you should run your unit test suite
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and compile the app to make
sure nothing is broken.
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Ruby test_decoder.rb,
looks like all our unit tests are passing.
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Now, that your pull request
has been reviewed and
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you've resolved any conflicts, it should
be safe to merge your branch into master.
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Again, GitHub offers a shortcut button for
this, but we'll show you how to do
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it from the Command line, so
you understand what the button does.
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So start by checking out the master
branch, git checkout master.
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And we'll check for changes to master
one more time, just in case, git pull.
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If it shows further changes, you'll need
to repeat the process of merging master
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into your topic branch, but it hasn't
been very long, so it probably won't.
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And now, you merge your topic branch into
your master branch, git merge add-letters.
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Because we just recently merged
master into our topic branch,
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it's able to merge by fast-forwarding.
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Now, you should be able to push
your master branch, git push.
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If you refresh the pull request page,
you'll see that the changes have been
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merged into master, the same as if
you'd pushed GitHub's shortcut button.
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Now, you can safely clean everything up.
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You can click the button
to Close pull request.
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You can also click the button to delete
the branch of the GitHub repository,
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since it won't be needed anymore.
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And since the changes from your local
branch have all been merged in a master,
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you can delete that as well,
git branch -d add letters.
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You're still not quite done yet.
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Now it's time to release your software.
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For most projects, the master branch
represents what's deployed to production.
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If you're working on a web app, that means
the latest version on master is what
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should be set up on the web server for
people to use.
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If you're making an app that people
install to their computers or phones,
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the latest version of master
should be compiled, and
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made available on a server for
people to download.
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Most teams choose to write scripts
that will automatically pull code from
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the master branch and deploy it for you.
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If you're working on a project
that has such a script,
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now would be the time to run it.
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But that's another project to
complete using other tools.
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For now, give yourself a pat on the back,
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because you've mastered
an important concept Git branches.
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You now know everything you need to be
a productive collaborator on Git repos.
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