Local pull requests in Git

One of GitHub’s nicer features are pull requests, annotated merges between branches that preserve commit history. When you’re the only one working in a local Git repository, you notice their absence. Here’s what a local repository looks like after two commits.

A---B master

Since you’re the only one working in the repository, history marches forward in a straight line. If you create a branch from B, and commit to it twice, you’ll get a forked history.

      C---D branch
     /
A---B------ master

When you merge the branch back to master, an optimization takes place. Git notices no changes to master since the branch was created, so it collapses the history of the branch. This is called a fast forward merge.

A---B---C---D master

Fast forward merges create the illusion that all the work happened in the master branch. If you want to preserve the record that work happened in a branch, you can pass the “–no-ff” flag to the merge command.

      C---D
     /     \
A---B-------E master

This leaves an additional commit in the history when the branches come back together. This extra commit is called a “merge commit”. When you close a pull request on GitHub, it’s preserving the record that work happened in a branch by doing a merge without fast forwarding. So you remember to add the “–no-ff” flag when you merge branches, you can alias git merge --no-ff to git mg.

git config --global alias.mg 'merge --no-ff'

The above command adds an alias to your ~/.gitconfig file for the “mg” command.

[alias]
mg = merge --no-ff

Preserving the history of a branch when you merge gives you the opportunity to describe why the merge is taking place. Time stamps associated with the commits let you figure out how long the work on a branch took. Keeping historical context is like leaving tiny clues for your future self.