How to resolve conflicts in rebase
Łukasz Holeczek
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Conflicts during Git rebase operations are common when rebasing branches with divergent changes, and knowing how to resolve them is essential for maintaining a clean commit history.
As the creator of CoreUI with over 25 years of software development experience, I’ve resolved countless rebase conflicts in collaborative projects with distributed teams.
When Git encounters conflicts during rebase, it pauses the operation and marks conflicting files, requiring you to manually resolve them before continuing.
The process involves editing files, staging changes, and using git rebase --continue to proceed.
Resolve conflicts manually in the marked files, then stage changes and continue the rebase.
# Start rebase (conflict occurs)
git rebase main
# Git pauses and shows conflict message
# Open conflicting files and resolve markers:
# <<<<<<< HEAD
# =======
# >>>>>>> commit-message
# After resolving conflicts in files:
git add .
git rebase --continue
# If multiple commits have conflicts, repeat the process
# To abort the rebase at any time:
git rebase --abort
Best Practice Note
When conflicts occur, Git marks them with conflict markers in your files. Edit the file to keep the desired changes and remove the markers. After staging resolved files with git add, use git rebase --continue to proceed with the next commit. If you realize the rebase was a mistake, git rebase --abort returns your branch to its pre-rebase state. For complex rebases with many conflicts, consider using git mergetool to launch a visual merge tool. This is the same workflow we use in CoreUI development when rebasing feature branches onto the latest main branch before creating pull requests.
