How to force pull before push

Question

Every time I want to push my commits (git commit -m "message", git push origin <branch>), I do a pull (git pull origin <branch>).
Is there any way to make git do a pull before performing my push? (on the same branch)

Answer 1

The Git way to do this is with customize Git hooks.

In your case, you will need to go to the .git/hooks directory on your repository, and add a file named pre-push, which is a script of your choice, e.g. (bash in this example)

#!/bin/bash

echo "pulling ..."
git pull

This script will be called when you do git push and before the actual push.

Obviously, this is just a very naive sample, but I hope you get the idea. There are samples in this directory already. Comment if anything still unclear.

Answer 2

Based on the OP's comments, they appear to be trying to avoid a merge commit between their recent commits and the commits on the remote, which is normally generated by a git pull when the local and remote histories have diverged.

The explicit way to do this is to first fetch and the rebase, and finally push.

git fetch
git rebase origin/master
git push

A second way to do this is to pass --rebase when invoking git pull.

git pull --rebase

Finally, one can make this the default behavior of git pull by setting the configuration.

git config --global pull.rebase true