Question 1

What is the difference between git fetch and git pull?

Accepted Answer

Fetching downloads new commits from the remote and updates your remote-tracking references. It changes nothing about your working tree or your local branches. After fetching you know what has happened elsewhere, and your own work is untouched.

Pulling is fetching followed immediately by integrating those commits into your current branch. By default that integration is a merge, which can create a merge commit and, if your local changes overlap, can stop halfway with conflicts to resolve.

The practical difference is control. Fetching first lets you look before you leap: you can see how far behind you are, review what changed, and decide whether to merge, rebase, or wait. Pulling makes that decision for you at the moment you run it, which is convenient right up until it is not.

This matters most when you have uncommitted work. A pull that needs to merge will refuse or conflict, sometimes leaving a partially resolved state that is confusing if you were not expecting an integration at all. Fetching is always safe regardless of what your working tree looks like.

Many people configure pulling to rebase rather than merge, which keeps history linear and avoids merge commits for routine updates. That is a reasonable default for a personal feature branch, but it rewrites your local commits, so the usual caution about anything already shared applies.

A useful habit is to fetch routinely, inspect the difference between your branch and its remote counterpart, and integrate deliberately. It costs one extra command and removes most of the surprises people associate with updating a repository.

Question 2

When should I use git rebase instead of git merge?

Accepted Answer

Both commands integrate work from one branch into another, and they differ in what happens to history. Merge records that two lines of development came together, creating a merge commit with two

Question 3

What does git stash do and when should I use it?

Accepted Answer

Stashing takes your uncommitted changes, saves them aside, and returns the working tree to a clean state matching the last commit. The changes are not lost; they are stored on a stack you can reapply

Question 4

What does detached HEAD mean in Git and how do I get out of it?

Accepted Answer

Normally HEAD is a pointer to a branch name, and that branch points to a commit. Committing moves the branch forward and HEAD follows along. A detached HEAD means HEAD points straight at a commit

Question 5

What is trunk-based development?

Accepted Answer

A branching strategy where everyone commits to a single shared branch frequently — at least daily — with short-lived branches lasting hours rather than weeks. It is the practice most strongly

Question 6

What is a merge conflict and how do I resolve it?

Accepted Answer

A conflict occurs when two branches changed the same region of a file and Git cannot determine which version is correct. It is not an error, and it does not mean anyone did anything wrong. Git

Question 7

How do I undo the last commit in Git without losing my changes?

Accepted Answer

Which command you want depends on whether the commit has been pushed, because that decides whether rewriting history is safe. If the commit is still local, a soft reset to the previous commit is what

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