Git merge options for merging conflicted changes. (Our or Theirs)

We can  tell Git to favor one side or the other when it sees a conflict.

By default, when Git sees a conflict between two branches being merged, it will add merge conflict markers into your code and mark the file as conflicted and let you resolve it. If you would prefer for Git to simply choose a specific side and ignore the other side instead of letting you manually resolve the conflict, you can pass the merge command either a -Xours or -Xtheirs.

If Git sees this, it will not add conflict markers. Any differences that are mergeable, it will merge. Any differences that conflict, it will simply choose the side you specify in whole, including binary files.

$ git merge mundo
Auto-merging hello.rb
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in hello.rb
Resolved 'hello.rb' using previous resolution.
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

However if we run it with -Xours or -Xtheirs it does not.

$ git merge -Xours mundo
Auto-merging hello.rb
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 hello.rb | 2 +-
 test.sh  | 2 ++
 2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
 create mode 100644 test.sh

In that case, instead of getting conflict markers in the file with “hello mundo” on one side and “hola world” on the other, it will simply pick “hola world”. However, all the other non-conflicting changes on that branch are merged successfully in.

This option can also be passed to the git merge-file command we saw earlier by running something like git merge-file --ours for individual file merges.