How to avoid git conflicts in a team?

Question

We are some developers who work on same project and we use git for the project. If two or more of us happen to work on same file, we receive git conflicts which are hard to

Answer 1

Inform colleagues when you have pushed your changes

Another way to reduce the pain of conflicts is simply to inform colleagues when you have pushed your changes. It allows them to pull your changes and resolve some conflicts there and then. Any conflicts are likely to be between your recent change, fresh in your mind and what they are working on, fresh in their minds.

If people don't pull changes from the main branch until they have finished a large development and then have conflicts with changes made by a number of people, all in the same area, then it will be harder to resolve.

Use a mergetool

One of Git's purpose's is version control. Other programs specialize in merging files and resolving conflicts. If you configure a mergetool to use with git, then it can automatically resolve many issues which git regards as a conflict, or at least make a very good guess for you to inspect and simply leave untouched if it looks okay, or you trust the tool.

That leaves fewer genuine conflicts which need an intelligent decision for resolution.

Use smaller files

I add a new controller at the bottom of mycontrollers.js and you add a new controller at the bottom of yourcontrollers.js: no problem.

We both add a new controller at the bottom of allcontrollers.js: conflict.

(However remember the advice about ordering things alphabetically too. myNewController() starting with M might go in the middle of a file and yourNewController() starting with Y might go at the end of the same file, again with no conflict.)