How to avoid merge commits from Git pull when pushing to remote

I have a repository and some local changes to commit. Before committing, I pulled the changes onto my local using Egit in Eclipse.

It creates a merge commit and I submit my commit over it.

Now when I am trying to push to origin, it is showing that it will push my commit as well as merge commit. But ideally, merge commit should not be a part of remote repository.

How to avoid this?

Use rebase option whenever you pull from remote repository. Please follow the below steps,

1. Commit your changes - It will create a new commit in your local.
2. Now do git pull --rebase <remote-name> <branch-name>.
3. Basically the rebase take out your commits that you committed on the current branch HEAD as a patch. Then it will apply all the remote commits on top of HEAD and then applies your commits on top of it.
4. So best practice is to commit changes then pull remote commits by using rebase option.

You can run

git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always

to make git pull --rebase the default behaviour for git pull.

When you have uncommitted changes, you can do,

git stash
git pull --rebase <remote> <branch>
git stash apply

If you don't want a merge commit the best way to synchronize your local branch to the remote branch is to do a rebase. It is recommended that you do first a git fetch and then git rebase, however, as others have mentioned you can do both at the same time:

git pull --rebase --autostash

If you always do this you can configure git pull to do this automatically:

git config --global pull.rebase true
git config --global rebase.autostash true

The usual strategy is to work on a branch. When the remote master changes, pull the changes to master and instead of merging, rebase the branch.

See Git Rebase at Atlassian.

Scenario:

Suppose a is PR raised in GIT repo : from feature/my_bug_fix into release/project-007. But GIT is not allowing merge due to conflicts between above branches.

Then do this:

$ git checkout feature/my_bug_fix

$ git pull --rebase origin release/project-007

$ # resolve any conflicts encountered during the process

$ git rebase --continue

$ git push origin feature/my_bug_fix  --force

It is an effective & clean way to resolve conflicting branches. Additionally, by using --rebase you will not get merge commits which would otherwise appear if you used git merge.

Moreover:

pull          = fetch + merge

pull --rebase = fetch + rebase

So, choose the way the branch is to be handled.

You should now better understand the difference between merge and rebase :)