Adding a git remote and rebasing your local branch

You may often want to work from a fork of another repository and then merge a branch on your fork into that repository. Understanding how synchronize your fork's branch locally with that repository is very helpful.

This will show you how to create a local git remote and rebase your local branch with a remote branch.

Rebasing a branch in git means to reapply commits from another branch on top of your local branch. Rebasing is a useful way to update your fork's branch locally if the repostory that it is based on has changed.

Adding a git remote

Git can be used to add a remote branch. Assuming you already have git initialized, you can get started:

git remote add [remoteName] https://github.com/[username]/[repository].git

For example:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/myusername/sample.git

Rebasing local branch with remote

Fetch updates from the remote branch and rebase the your local branch with the remote

git fetch [remoteName]
git rebase [remoteName]/[branchName]

For example,

git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/main

If there is a merge conflict, you will probably want to resolve it.

Below are some commands that can be used during a merge conflict.

• Continue - When the conflict has been resolved, this will finish the rebase.

  git rebase --continue
  

• Abort - stops the rebase and checks out the original branch

  git rebase --abort
  

• Skip - skips the rebase of the commit that has caused the merge conflict. None of the changes in that commit will be applied.

  git rebase --skip
  

  Once you have completed the rebase, your checked out branch is now be in sync with remoteName.