How to prevent Gitlab from creating extra merge commit on branch merge

Question

I use GitLab in my project. I\'m exploring Merge Requests feature.

1. I created a topic_branch from master.
2. Made a bunch of commit

Answer 1

1. checkout master
2. merge topic_branch into master
3. commit / push master In this case, there would be only 1 commit on master.

That is not true. You will have all the commits from topic_branch and a Merge branch 'topic_branch'commit in your master, except the case that no commits were added to your master branch since you branched off topic_branch. In this case, the default behaviour of git merge is to perform a fast forward merge. A fast forward merge merges your topic_branches changes to master without a merge commit (see here for further documentation).

However, when you create a merge request in GitLab, as the name says, you are requesting to merge your topic_branch into your code base. Per default, GitLab will always create a merge request, even if a fast forward merge is possible, to preserve the fact that the commits were developed on another branch in your history.

Now the good news: you can configure GitLab to perform fast-forward merges instead of creating merge commits: see here. It seems, however, that this is only possible in GitLab Enterprise Edition.