The Dreaded GitHub Rebase Message

Disclaimer: This is a stupid ass post that basically reflects my inability to remember a simple git command and the fact that I generally work as a solo contributor and don’t hit code merge conflicts often.

If you change your git repo server side and then pull, you may well see this error:

❯ git pull origin main
remote: Enumerating objects: 6, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (6/6), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 5 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (5/5), 1.42 KiB | 1.42 MiB/s, done.
From github.com:fuzzygroup/imgarr
 * branch            main       -> FETCH_HEAD
   d80530e..a954fd6  main       -> origin/main
hint: You have divergent branches and need to specify how to reconcile them.
hint: You can do so by running one of the following commands sometime before
hint: your next pull:
hint:
hint:   git config pull.rebase false  # merge
hint:   git config pull.rebase true   # rebase
hint:   git config pull.ff only       # fast-forward only
hint:
hint: You can replace "git config" with "git config --global" to set a default
hint: preference for all repositories. You can also pass --rebase, --no-rebase,
hint: or --ff-only on the command line to override the configured default per
hint: invocation.
fatal: Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches.

As with many git error messages, this can be disconcerting. Here’s what this means and what to do:

A change was made to your source code by another committer (either another person or Git itself).
Your local git installation doesn’t know how to resolve it.
You have options like rebase or ff (fast forward).
Git won’t do anything until you tell it what to do.

Here’s the default option I always use which my (very talented) boss, Taylor Williams, at Glass Ivy told me: “Just use rebase; it almost always works perfectly”.

Here’s the git command you need:

git pull origin main --rebase