Doing a Git Pull with a Rebase instead of a Merge

gistfile1.txt

Pull with rebase instead of merge

$ git pull --rebase

# e.g. if on branch "master": performs a `git fetch origin`,
# then `git rebase origin/master`
Because branch merges in git are recorded with a merge commit, they are supposed to be meaningful—for example, to indicate when a feature has been merged to a release branch. However, during a regular daily workflow where several team members sync a single branch often, the timeline gets polluted with unnecessary micro-merges on regular git pull. Rebasing ensures that the commits are always re-applied so that the history stays linear.

You can configure certain branches to always do this without the --rebase flag:

# make `git pull` on master always use rebase
$ git config branch.master.rebase true
You can also set up a global option to set the last property for every new tracked branch:

# setup rebase for every tracking branch
$ git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always