Git branch has diverged after rebase, so why rebase?

Question

Recently I came across the notification that my branch has diverged. That was when I made a feature branch, pushed it to remote, and did a rebase with master a few days later when I started working on it again.

git checkout -b feature-branch
git push origin feature-branch:feature-branch

...and when in master...

git pull origin master
git checkout feature-branch
git rebase master

But when I want to push my branch again, it says:

On branch feature-branch
Your branch and 'origin/feature-branch' have diverged,
and have 67 and 1 different commit each, respectively.

I found this answer in "Git branch diverged after rebase":

Since you'd already pushed the branch, you should have merged in the source branch, rather than rebasing against it.

Question

After reading this I still don't fully understand what I should've done differently in my flow, and why I still want to be using git rebase. Hope someone can explain this, thanks!

Answer 1

The idea is to rebase only if you haven't pushed yet, to replay your local commits.

As soon as you have pushed (and are working in a team), you should not rebase the branch on top of master, as it rewrites its SHA1, forcing you to force push the new state of the branch.

Making a git merge master into your branch is preferable here: you resolve the conflicts locally, then you can more commits, and a regular push.

See more at "What is the difference between merging master into branch and merging branch into master?"