Resolving conflicts when merging release to develop

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Quick post on something I recently had to deal with related to Gitflow. I hope you will find it helpful if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

Problem

I had a release branch cut from develop and over a couple of days the two branches diverged from each other. After releasing to Production, it was time to resolve conflicts and back-merge release branch into develop.

The challenges were:

• Need to resolve a conflict without changing any code in the release branch (see below for reasoning)
• Need to go through a pull request in order to merge into develop — direct commits to develop are not supported in my repo

There are several reasons not to update release branch after deploying to Production

1. As part of the Gitflow workflow, the release branch also gets tagged and merged to master which will represent a snapshot of what was released to Production.
2. In my CI/CD setup, pushing any changes to release branch triggers a new release candidate build to Play Store.

Solution

The solution turned out to be pretty simple — by using an intermediary branch to resolve a conflict in.

Step 1. Create a new branch based on release. Let’s call it resolve-conflict

Step 2. Merge develop into resolve-conflict as a merge commit

git merge develop

Step 3. Resolve conflicts in resolve-conflict branch— now you should be able to merge this branch into develop.

Step 4. Merge resolve-conflict into develop

And that’s it! The open pull request release -> develop will now automatically be closed since the version control system (Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc.) will recognize that the code in release has now been integrated into develop.

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