Hey everybody it's Jack from The Modern Coder
and today I'm going to explain how to solve merge conflicts that come up when using git cherry pick.
There are two main types of merge conflicts that typically come up when using cherry pick, and I'll
explain both of those. As always I'll be using live animations of what's happening under the hood
while I'm issuing these commands, and you'll find those animations pop up right above my head in
this video. I promise these animations really help and I'm confident by the end of this video
you will not only understand how to fix any merge conflicts you come across, but you'll be able to
tackle them without any fear. Alright let's not waste any time. Let's jump right into it! Here's
what my repository looks like at the moment: that white branch is mainline and then you can
see my co-worker split off onto that blue branch to work on some navigational components. But as
you can see they've also fixed a bug before they started working on that nav component, and let's
say I want to take just that bug fix and pull it over into mainline without taking any of their
other in progress changes. This is what cherry pick is really good for. If I were to start that
cherry picking process by going ahead and grabbing the commit hash of the bug fix and attempting
to cherry pick you're going to see that I have a problem, I have a merge conflict. Well how do you
know what failed? Well the failure message on the screen doesn't tell us that much so let's clear
the screen and run 'git status' to get a bit more information. Okay this is much better. What this
is telling us is that we are currently on main. We're also currently in the process
of picking this specific commit, and it also gives us a little cheatsheet about how
to proceed in the case that we need a reminder of what our options are from here. Lastly it tells
us which files it had trouble merging, and that's the key part. As you can see here it tells us that
both the bug fix commit and the latest commit on main modified config.yaml and it couldn't merge
it automatically. If I pull up our git tree and zoom in a little bit on these commits you can see
that the bug fix commit actually fixed a bug in config.yaml file; however since splitting off,
main has also gotten a new commit that modified config.yaml as well and that's why there's a
merge conflict. Okay let's fix it. First off, if you realize you've gotten in over your head and
you just want to eject from the situation and you don't want to do the cherry pick anymore you can
always type 'git cherry-pick --abort' like this and git will cancel your cherry pick and set
everything back to normal. Okay let's just roll it back and say we do actually want to continue
to fix this conflict. We need to open up the file that has the conflict and manually fix it. In
this case the file is config.yaml and so I'll just open it for editing in VI. And I'm just using Vim
because it's available on most terminal systems, but you can use any text editor that you
want whether you use Sublime, VS Code, JetBrains whatever. You want to look for these
weird looking lines with the less than and greater than characters, this is the specific spot in
the file that git couldn't merge automatically. As you can see: that top section indicates what
that part of the file looks like on main, and below that you can see what that part of the file
looks like on the bug fix branch. Your goal is to manually replace this entire block with what those
lines should look like after the merge: there may be one or more of these blocks. So as you can
see here that "show_drafts" moving from "true" to "false" is the bug fix so I want to keep that.
I'll just press "I" in Vim to enter edit mode and change that to "false". Then on mainline looks
like the new changes are the addition of these social media handles so we can keep those. Then if
I go ahead and delete the rest of the lines that we don't need this is what the file should look
like after the merge. That's it! You can make any changes you want, but for now that's all I need.
For Vim the command to exit and save the file is 'esc:wq' so I'm going to go ahead and enter that.
I'm popped back out onto my main terminal. Now that we've made that merge manually, we can go
ahead and stage that file by using 'git add'. We can go ahead and verify this by typing 'git
status' again, and you can see it turns green that they're waiting to be committed. From
here it's really easy, all we have to do is type 'git cherry-pick --continue' for it
to continue the cherry picking operation. One last thing before we're done, git is going to
kick us into our terminal's default text editor to specify a commit message. This is good practice to
give descriptive names to our commits especially if they were cherry pick. So it ported over the
original commit message here so I'll add "bug fix in config", I'll also say "added socials". Then
we're going to make sure to let it know that this was cherry picked from this particular commit.
Then I'm going to save it, and again it's 'esc:wq' if you're using Vim, hit enter and that's it! Now
if I clear the screen and run 'git log --oneline', you can see I end up with that cherry picked
commit right on top: that includes our merge. I promised there were two types of merge conflicts
that you could potentially run across with cherry pick, and the second type of conflict is
going to happen when those files on main aren't committed yet. So in other words they're
just your local changes. Now if that's the case, when you run 'git cherry-pick' you're going
to end up with a message like this - slightly different than the last message that we saw.
What git is telling you here is that you have local changes that conflict with the cherry
pick that you're trying to do and it's just going to abort altogether. Now you can either
commit those changes into a commit on main and go through that same workflow we just talked
about OR you could just also set aside those local changes using 'git stash' and push them to
the side then continue with your cherry pick as you did before. That's going to work, but when
you go to pull those changes out of your stash you're going to get a merge
conflict that you have to solve, so either way you're on a
collision course with merge. I'll have a video out about git stashing
shortly because the workflow is pretty cool, but if you want to use it, fixing a git stash
apply merge conflict is very similar to what you just learned in this video so I'm sure you
could figure it out. If you want to learn more, and other git techniques with this
same sort of video animation style, I have a whole playlist and multiple other videos
about that. Subscribe if you want more git videos, then let me know in the comments if there's
anything else you'd like me to cover in this way. Other than that I think that's all I got for
now, thanks for watching and I'll see you later!
