How to Finish a Merge After Resolving Conflicts in Git

This article outlines the process of completing a merge after resolving the merge conflicts in Git. We will go through the merging steps, resolve conflicts and finish the merge.

Finish a Merge After Resolving Conflicts in Git

For easier context, we will simulate a scenario where merging two branches in our repository results in conflict. Here is the typical workflow.

Switch to our main branch and make some edits to the README.md file.

$ git checkout main

After making edits, we will commit the file, switch to our Dev2.1 branch and make changes to the README.md file.

$ git checkout Dev2.1

We will edit the same lines for Git to create a merge conflict. After committing, we can now run the git merge command.

$ git merge main

Output:

To resolve merge conflicts, we highly recommend using a mergetool like Meld. We already have Meld configured as our default diff and mergetool.

To launch it, we will run:

$ git mergetool

After resolving the conflicts, we can quickly check the state of our working tree and index.

$ git status

Output:

As suggested by Git, we can run the git commit command to finish the merge process. In our case, we will run:

$ git commit -m "Merge Dev2.1 to main"

Output:

[Dev2.1 cb9b842] Merge Dev2.1 to main

An alternative way of finishing a merge is using the git merge --continue command. The command will prompt us to a text editor where we are supposed to give our commit a name to finish the merge.

$ git merge --continue

If we do not want to edit the commit message, we can run:

$ git merge --continue --no-edit

Output:

In a nutshell, we can complete a merge after resolving conflicts using Git’s suggested command, git commit or git merge --continue command. Both will give the same desired output.