If you've ever contributed to an Open Source project on GitHub (or really even just used Git in general) chances are there's been a time when you needed to rebase your branch with what's on master. It can be a bit confusing to Rob Allen is here to help with this brief guide to walk you through the steps for a successful rebase.

You've successfully created a PR and it's in the queue to be merged. A maintainer looks at the code and asks you to rebase your PR so that they can merge it. Say what?

The maintainer means that there have been other code changes on the project since you branched which means that your branch cannot be merged without conflicts and they would like to you to sort this out. These are the steps you should take.

He breaks it down into three main steps and includes the commands you'll need and how to push the result back up into the waiting repository:

• Update your target branch from upstream
• Rebase your branch
• Push your newly rebased branch to origin

There's really about six steps involved but that's only when you break it down to the individual commands. It's a relatively simple process that, while a bit confusing from the outside, can be very helpful to a project maintainer when it comes merge time.