Your branch and 'origin/main' have diverged, how to fix this ?

I have been working in my local repository and on running command git status, I noticed that my local branch and main branch have diverged. The git status command shows “Your branch and ‘origin/main’ have diverged“. In this sneppet you will learn what you need to do when you face this issue.

Your branch and ‘origin/main’ have diverged

After running git status command I see the following output

$ git status

On branch main
Your branch and 'origin/main' have diverged,
and have 1 and 5 different commits each, respectively.
  (use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours) 

nothing to commit, working tree clean

For example, the file1.txt in my local branch has the following changes.

first line
second line
last line

And let’s say the file1.txt in the main Git branch has the following changes.

first line
second line
third line

What to do when your branch is diverged with master or main branch ?

I tried to follow suggestion in the git status output. Hence I tried to run git pull command as shown below. It is evident that the automatic merge failed and the conflicts had to be fixed manually and then commit the result.

$ git pull

Auto-merging file1.txt
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in file1.txt
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result. 

first line
<<<<<<< HEAD
second line
last line
=======
second line
third line
>>>>>>> 774e727606ee3fd5bff09fc4548a453410041c70

Therefore, I had fixed the conflicts manually so that modified file1.txt content looks like below.

first line
second line
third line
last line

Then, add the modified file using git add command to mark the resolution.

$ git add .

After this, use git commit command conclude the merge since all the conflicts were resolved and changes are added to the staging area.

$ git commit

Finally, run git push command to push all the changes to remote repository or main branch.

$ git push

Enumerating objects: 10, done.
Counting objects: 100% (10/10), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (6/6), 997 bytes | 249.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 6 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
-----
----

That’s all. Now when you run git status command you should not see the message “Your branch and ‘origin/main’ have diverged” in the output. Hope you find this sneppet helpful 🙂

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References