Rebasing vs. Merging

When working with Git, you often find your branch diverging from another, like your feature branch from main.

How do you bring those changes together? Git offers two primary strategies: merging and rebasing. Both achieve integration, but they do so in fundamentally different ways, leading to different project histories.

Merging is Git's default way to integrate changes. When you merge one branch into another, Git takes the content of the source branch and combines it with the target branch.

The key characteristic of a merge is that it creates a new merge commit. This commit has two parent commits, explicitly showing that two divergent histories were brought together. It preserves the exact history of both branches.