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

A simple and safe way to do this—without a push or a forced update—is to fetch feature1 into master:

(feature1)$ git fetch . feature1:master
From .
   4a6000d..8675309  feature1   -> master

The trick is using . to get the local feature1 ref. This is safer than forcibly updating the master branch, since it ensures the update is a fast-forward. (See the parameter in the git-fetch documentation for details.)

Now that feature1 and master are the same, switching between them will not touch any files:

(feature1)$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
(master)$