Tag: pbxproj

Flatiron School Week 9 – Resolving my first real git merge conflict

This week we started our client projects. 19 people broke down into teams of 4 or 5. There were four clients and our team had four people. This was the first time that I really needed to deal with git merge conflicts and develop a workflow.

It wasn’t long before I had a conflict.

There were three files that I conflicts with:

  1. AppDelegate.m
  2. the .pbxproj file
  3. a xccheckout file

1. AppDelegate.m

I knew how to resolve the first one, but as I tried to do that, my file directory on the left side of Xcode disappeared. It was time to ask for help. Zach, one of our TAs, helped me put together a plan to resolve the conflicts.

I had to back out of the merge, so I used

git merge --abort

and then reset the head to the last commit because there some uncommit changes that I didn’t want anymore.

git reset --hard <commit id>

2. the .pbxproj file

Apparently that file directory is stored in the .pbxproj file. The way that we resolved this was by telling git to just join the two versions together in the .gitattributes file by adding:

*.pbxproj merge=union

Another way to resolve this is to choose one version of the pbxproj.

git checkout --ours <directory/file>

Replace “ours” with “theirs” to get the version being merged into the current branch.

I had to add in some files that were no longer referenced by the pbxproj file after the merge using this second method.

3. a xccheckout file

For the .xccheckout file, this was a file that should have been ignored. I added this to the .gitignore file.

*.xccheckout

The problem was that both versions that I was trying to merge still had this file in tracked files. I had to remove this file from both repos by running:

git rm --cached <directory/file>

Once the .xccheckout file was removed, I could merge the two repos.

Both the .gitignore and .gitattributes files should be set up at the beginning of a project.

Update

Since that week, we’ve had to resolve conflicts many times. Following Github’s workflow has been pretty useful. I’ve found that the best way to resolve conflicts is prevention. We designed our workflow so that each person worked on a different part of the app and that minimized conflicts.