Resolve Git merge conflicts in favor of their chan

Question

How do I resolve a git merge conflict in favor of pulled changes?

Basically I need to remove all conflicting changes from a working tree without having to go through all of the conflicts with a git mergetool while keeping all conflict-free changes. Preferably doing this while pulling, not afterwards.

Answer 1

You can use the recursive "theirs" strategy option:

git merge --strategy-option theirs

From the man:

ours
    This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved cleanly by 
    favoring our version. Changes from the other tree that do not 
    conflict with our side are reflected to the merge result.

    This should not be confused with the ours merge strategy, which does 
    not even look at what the other tree contains at all. It discards 
    everything the other tree did, declaring our history contains all that
    happened in it.

theirs
    This is opposite of ours.

Note: as the man page says, the "ours" merge strategy option is very different from the "ours" merge strategy.

Answer 2

To resolve all conflicts with the version in a particular branch:

git diff --name-only --diff-filter=U | xargs git checkout ${branchName}

So, if you are already in the merging state, and you want to keep the master version of the conflicting files:

git diff --name-only --diff-filter=U | xargs git checkout master

Answer 3

from https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Advanced-Merging

This will basically do a fake merge. It will record a new merge commit with both branches as parents, but it will not even look at the branch you’re merging in. It will simply record as the result of the merge the exact code in your current branch.

$ git merge -s ours mundo

Merge made by the 'ours' strategy.

$ git diff HEAD HEAD~

You can see that there is no difference between the branch we were on and the result of the merge.

This can often be useful to basically trick Git into thinking that a branch is already merged when doing a merge later on. For example, say you branched off a release branch and have done some work on it that you will want to merge back into your master branch at some point. In the meantime some bugfix on master needs to be backported into your release branch. You can merge the bugfix branch into the release branch and also merge -s ours the same branch into your master branch (even though the fix is already there) so when you later merge the release branch again, there are no conflicts from the bugfix.

A situation I've found to be useful if I want master to reflect the changes of a new topic branch. I've noticed that -Xtheirs doesn't merge without conflicts in some circumstances... e.g.

$ git merge -Xtheirs topicFoo 

CONFLICT (modify/delete): js/search.js deleted in HEAD and modified in topicFoo. Version topicFoo of js/search.js left in tree.

In this case the solution I found was

$ git checkout topicFoo

from topicFoo, first merge in master using the -s ours strategy, this will create the fake commit that is just the state of topicFoo. $ git merge -s ours master

check the created merge commit

$ git log

now checkout the master branch

$ git checkout master

merge the topic branch back but this time use the -Xtheirs recursive strategy, this will now present you with a master branch with the state of topicFoo.

$ git merge -X theirs topicFoo

Answer 4

VS Code (integrated Git) IDE Users:

If you want to accept all the incoming changes in the conflict file then do the following steps.

1. Go to command palette - Ctrl + Shift + P
2. Select the option - Merge Conflict: Accept All Incoming

Similarly you can do for other options like Accept All Both, Accept All Current etc.,

Answer 5

The git pull -X theirs answers may create an ugly merge commit, or issue an

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:

If you want to simply ignore any local modifications to files from the repo, for example on a client that should always be a mirror of an origin, run this (replace master with the branch you want):

git fetch && git reset --hard origin/master

How does it work? git fetch does git pull but without merge. Then git reset --hard makes your working tree match the last commit. All of your local changes to files in the repo will be discarded, but new local files will be left alone.

Answer 6

If you're already in conflicted state, and you want to just accept all of theirs:

git checkout --theirs .
git add .

If you want to do the opposite:

git checkout --ours .
git add .

This is pretty drastic, so make sure you really want to wipe everything out like this before doing it.