Git checkout and merge without touching working tree

Question

Say I have a feature branch, into which I merge upstream changes prior to pushing my changes back:

git branch feature1
... [edit my code]
... [commit]
git fe         


        

Answer 1

[Edit] This is only a partial solution / workaround. See the actual answer by @djpohly below.

Firstly, you can push from anywhere. Doesn't matter what you have checked out, or whether the commits you want to push are in master.

git push REMOTE_REPO feature1:master

see git help push

Hint: git push remoteRepo localRef:remoteRef

As for bringing master to where you are now without fiddling with your working copy... You can force it like so:

# (while still on feature1 branch)
git checkout -B master origin/master

But this does a hard reset on master. ie it doesn't check for fast-forward.