Merging a Pull Request

Approved. Merging puts the branch's commits into main — and GitHub performs exactly the merge you learned in Chapter 6, on its own copy of the repository.

Two things follow immediately, and both are commonly forgotten. The branch should be deleted, and your laptop does not yet know any of this happened.

Pressing merge

The button merges the branch into main on GitHub's side. The pull request closes and keeps everything attached to it: the description, every comment, every commit, and the record of who approved it.

That archive is quietly valuable. A year later, "why does the meeting time live in one place instead of two" is answerable by finding the pull request, and the answer is a conversation rather than a guess.

The three buttons

GitHub offers three ways to merge, and teams pick one and stay consistent.

Create a merge commit — the default, reached by the button labelled Merge pull request — is the Chapter 6 behaviour: your commits go into main as they are, plus a merge commit recording the join. It is this book's default and the most honest about what happened.

Squash and merge flattens every commit on the branch into one. The history becomes one entry per pull request, which some teams much prefer — at the cost of losing the individual steps.

Rebase and merge replays your commits onto main for a straight-line history. It is the thing this book does not teach, and you can recognize the button without using it.

None is correct in the abstract. Find out which one your project uses and follow it.

Deleting the branch

GitHub offers a button for this right after the merge. Take it. The commits are in main, so the label has done its job — exactly the argument from Chapter 6, with the same reasoning.

Bringing it home

This is the step people forget, and forgetting it causes tomorrow's confusion:

git switch main
git pull
git branch -d fix-meeting-time

The merge happened on GitHub's copy. Your local main is now behind, and until you pull it, everything you do starts from an outdated version of the project. GitHub's branch deletion also did nothing to your local label, which is why the third command is there.

When merging is blocked

Sometimes GitHub says the branch cannot be merged automatically. That means main moved while you were working, and the two changes overlap — the Chapter 6 conflict, arriving through a website.

Fix it locally, where you have your editor and the abort command:

git switch fix-meeting-time
git pull origin main
# resolve the conflict exactly as in Chapter 6, then:
git add index.html
git commit
git push

The pull request updates itself and the block clears. Same conflict, same markers, same resolution — one extra step at the start to bring main's changes into your branch.