What I do when my PR includes commits that are already in main

January 12, 20241 min readgit, github

Sometimes I have an open PR (branch my-pr) and I need to sync it with latest main. I usually do the following:

git checkout main
git pull origin main
git checkout my-pr

If there are merge conflicts, for some reason that I haven’t exactly figured out, commits that are already in main get included in my PR, when pushed.

Might not be the most elegant solution, but one which works effectively for me. After fixing merge conflicts, committing, and pushing, I do the following:

git checkout my-pr
git checkout -b my-pr-v2
git push origin my-pr-v2

Now, when opening the PR only my PR commits will be included. I can now close the PR that has branch my-pr.

Alternatively, I’ve read that it’s also possible to edit the PR via GitHub UI, change the base branch to another branch and back to main, but I haven’t tried this solution myself.