After Merging Changes on GitHub, Sync Them to Your Local Branch

After merging changes to main on GitHub, here’s how to sync them to your local main branch:

# Switch to your main branch
git checkout main

# Pull the latest changes from the remote main branch
git pull origin main

That’s it! The git pull command fetches the changes from GitHub and merges them into your local main branch.

Alternative approach (more explicit):

git checkout main
git fetch origin      # Download changes without merging
git merge origin/main # Merge the changes into local main

Common workflow: If you were working on a feature branch and merged it via a GitHub pull request, you’d typically do:

git checkout main
git pull origin main
git branch -d feature-branch-name  # Delete your local feature branch (optional)

Quick tip: If you want to update main while staying on your current branch:

git fetch origin main:main

This updates your local main branch without having to switch to it first.