Cannot push to GitHub - keeps saying need merge

Question

I\'m new to GitHub. Today I met some issue when I was trying to push my code to GitHub.

Pushing to git@github.com:519ebayproject/519ebayproject.git
To git@gi         


        

Answer 1

I had a similar issue and it turned out that my workflow for keeping my branch up to date was at fault. I was doing the following:

In my local 'master'

git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master --ff-only

then back in my local branch

git rebase master

This worked well for a previous git flow but not with github. The git rebase was the problem here causing issues with syncing (and I'll admit that's something I've had to accept without fully understanding) and unfortunately put me in a position where git push -f became probably the easiest option. Not good.

My new flow is to update the branch directly using git merge as follows:

In my local branch

git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master

No fast forward, as I will have made changes of course in the local branch.

As you can probably tell, I'm no git expert but I'm reliably informed that this workflow will probably avoid the specific problems that I had.