Merge

Now that we’ve finished making our changes, we’re ready to merge the results back into our master branch:

Note that the Git output frequently includes things like 34f06b7, which are related to Git’s internal representation of repositories. Your exact results will differ in these details, but otherwise should essentially match the output shown above.

        After you’ve merged in the changes, you can tidy up your branches by deleting the topic branch using git branch -d if you’re done with it:

This step is optional, and in fact it’s quite common to leave the topic branch intact. This way you can switch back and forth between the topic and master branches, merging in changes every time you reach a natural stopping point.

As mentioned above, it’s also possible to abandon your topic branch changes, in this case with git branch -D:

Unlike the -d flag, the -D flag will delete the branch even though we haven’t merged in the changes.