What is difference between merge, pull and pull --rebase?

[shwetasingh]

And when would you want to use one over the other. Thanks!

[githubstudent]

@shwetasingh

Assuming you are trying to retrieve changes from the remote and use them to update your local copy of the repository:

• merge is only half of the command. You would use fetch to retrieve a read only copy of the repo and then merge to explicitly add the changes to your local copy. The benefit of running it this way is that you can use git diff master origin/master to view the changes between the remote copy and your local copy.
• pull does the merge and the pull for you. It is magical, but you give up some control over which commits you apply. It will automatically try to perform a fast-forward merge unless you change your config settings to automatically rebase.
• pull --rebase - rather than merging in the changes, you are adding (or rebasing) your changes on top of the incoming changes.

Patrick will spend more time on this during the Q&A time at the end.