I’m collaborating on a coding project with my teammate using a shared repository. Here’s what happened:
My teammate cloned the repository to his local machine.
I made some updates and pushed them to the main branch.
Now my teammate has finished his work but can’t push his changes.
I think the issue might be that our local versions are out of sync. The only solution I can think of is for him to reset his local files, pull the latest updates, and then manually add his new code back in. Is there a better way to handle this situation? What’s the proper workflow when multiple people are working on the same codebase?
he should do git pull --rebase to get your changes and keep his commits on top. much simpler than resetting everything. if there are conflicts, he just edits the files, does git add, and runs git rebase --continue. it works like a charm.
Your teammate needs to run git pull first to merge your changes with his local work. Git handles most merging automatically, but if you both modified the same files, he’ll have to manually fix the conflicts - just edit the files and pick which changes to keep. Once he resolves conflicts and commits the merge, he can push.
For next time, use feature branches instead of both working on main. This completely avoids sync issues. Each person works on their own branch and merges back when done. You’ll definitely need this workflow once your team gets bigger than two people.
nah, don’t reset. just have him pull your updates first. if there’s conflicts, he can sort those out. then pushing works fine. always pull before pushing when you’re working together - saves tons of headaches.
Tell your teammate to use git fetch then git rebase origin/main instead of a regular pull. This replays his commits on top of your latest changes without creating messy merge commits. If conflicts pop up during rebase, he can fix them one by one and run git rebase --continue. After that, pushing should work fine. I’ve used this approach for years - it keeps commit history way cleaner than merge commits, especially when multiple people are pushing to the same branch constantly. Rebase takes some getting used to but it’s totally worth it for team projects.
Yeah, this happens all the time when you’re starting out with team development. Your teammate’s push got rejected because his local branch diverged from the remote - Git can’t safely merge the changes without risking lost work. Don’t do a full reset since that’ll wipe out his progress. He should run git status first to see what’s going on with his repo. Then just git pull origin main to grab your updates and merge them with his local changes. If you didn’t edit the same lines, Git handles it automatically and he can push right after. Going forward, make it a habit to pull before starting work and again before pushing - prevents most of these sync issues.