Solving conflicts on GitLab
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Solving conflicts
But what happens if 2 developers push a change to the same file? Well, let's take a look.
Let's imagine that our previously created file "page2.html" contains the following, very simple HTML code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>My second page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is our second page</h1>
</body>
</html>
Two developers make a change
Let's imagine that 2 developers "pull" the latest code above, and then both make a slightly different change, as follow (see added paragraph):
Developer 1:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>My second page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is our second page</h1>
<p>Some text about something</p>
</body>
</html>
Developer 2:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>My second page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is our second page</h1>
<p>Some other text about something else!</p>
</body>
</html>
Two developers push their changes
Developer 1 commits his change successfully:
git add page2.html git commit -m "commit by team member 1" git push -u origin master
Message displayed:
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
Then developer 2 tries to commit too:
git add page2.html git commit -m "commit by team member 2" git push -u origin master
But he gets an error message:
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://fsegitlab.wlv.ac.uk/in9352/great-work-by-alix.git' To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected Merge the remote changes (e.g. 'git pull') before pushing again.
The Git server tells developer 2 to "pull" the latest code again (which will include the change made by developer 1). Let's do that.
Resolving the conflict
Let's pull the code again:
git pull origin
This time a warning message tells us:
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in page2.html Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
Indeed when reopening his local copy of "page2.html", developer 2 is presented with the following:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>My second page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is our second page</h1>
<<<<<<< HEAD
<p>Some other text about something else!</p>
=======
<p>Some text about something</p>
>>>>>>> 8c409afad98a4a8af4ac0f17a3be594802bc5895
</body>
</html>
As you can see both changes (i.e. both paragraphs) are included, and highlighted by Git. It is up to developer 2 to decide which one to keep and push back to the server. Here a conversation between the 2 developers should take place, and a decision made (for example, merging the wording of the 2 paragraphs!), before the change can be pushed.
