🚀 Git Rebase & Conflict Resolution: A Step-by-Step Guide

Working in a collaborative Git environment often means rebasing your feature branch with the latest changes from base. This guide walks you through handling merge conflicts during a rebase, and how to safely push your updated branch back to GitHub.

🧭 Scenario

You’re working on a feature branch (e.g., feature/xyz) and your pull request (PR) shows:

❌ “This branch cannot be rebased due to conflicts”

To proceed, you need to rebase your branch onto the latest main, resolve conflicts, and update your branch.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Checkout Your Feature Branch

git checkout feature/xyz

2. Fetch the Latest Changes from Remote

git fetch origin

3. Start the Rebase onto base

git rebase origin/base

🔄 If there are conflicts, Git will pause and ask you to resolve them.

4. Resolve Merge Conflicts

Open each conflicted file shown in the terminal (e.g., src/page/index.astro) and manually fix the conflicts:

  • Keep the correct lines
  • Delete Git conflict markers like:
  <<<<<<< HEAD
  =======
  >>>>>>> commit-hash

Then stage the resolved file(s):

git add <file-name>

5. Continue the Rebase

git rebase --continue

Repeat Steps 4–5 for all remaining conflicts until rebase completes.

6. If You Get a Vim Commit Message Prompt

If Git opens the commit message editor (like Vim), save and quit:

  • In Vim: Press Esc, type :wq, and hit Enter

7. Verify Rebase Success

Once rebase finishes, Git will show:

Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/feature/RZA-250122.

8. Force Push Your Updated Branch

git push origin feature/xyz --force

⚠️ Force push is necessary because rebasing rewrites commit history.

📝 Optional Pull Request Comment

To inform reviewers, you can add a comment to your PR like:

Rebased onto latest `develop`, resolved conflicts in `index.astro`, and force-pushed. Ready for review ✅

🧯 Bonus Commands

To abort the rebase at any point:

git rebase --abort

To skip a conflicting commit instead of resolving:

git rebase --skip

To check current rebase status:

git status

🏁 You’re Done as your branch is now Synced with the latest base Free of conflicts cleanly rebased ready for review and merge

Thanks For Reading!

Prakash Raj