Update git branch with master without merge

Question

I am the sole developer working on a fairly big project. I made several important changes in master and I'm about to resume working on a feature branch that has fallen behind a good deal. The feature branch really does need the changes from master but I do not want to merge the changes into master until the work on feature is ready for release. I think this is a pretty straight forward case for rebasing, but I am not sure. Below is a very boiled down version of my situation (the actual history is much longer).

* 0e109d5 - (HEAD, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) latest commit
* 9188511 - major schema change
| * d3472a5 - (origin/feature, feature) feature branch commit
| * 6c36837 - Start of feature branch
|/  
*   80d93a8 - Base commit

1. I did push feature to the remote for safe-keeping, which is normally a bad thing for rebasing. But since it hasn't been shared with anyone else, can I simply delete the remote branch and continue like it never existed? My remote is there simply for offline storage and security (it is a plain git server, not github).
2. Assuming the remote branch is no longer an issue, can I just rebase master onto feature and just continue working on feature without also fast-forwarding master to the last feature branch commit?
3. I don't think I need to cherry pick because feature pretty much needs all the changes in master.
4. I think I can also just make a patch file (from the base commit to HEAD and try applying it to feature.

Any advice is appreciated. I love git, but I have no experience rebasing yet.

Answer 1

I think what you want here is to rebase feature onto master. Just do:

git rebase master feature

If you are currently on feature branch, just:

git rebase master

For your questions:

1. It deosn't matter since you are the sole developer. After the rebase, just push to your remote branch with -f or --force-with-lease. The latter one is more safe, but no difference here for sole developer.

   git push --force-with-lease origin feature
   

2. Yes, you don't need to fast-forwarding master at the moment. You can do it after you finish work on feature. You can use --ff-only to allow only fast-forward merge to keep your history linear.

   git checkout master
   git merge --ff-only feature
   

3. Yes, no cherry pick is needed here.

4. No need to use patch. Patch is used to distribute your changes to others.

   PS. git is really friendly with patch. You can do it either way as follows.

   git diff > some.patch
   git apply some.patch
   

   Or

   git diff > some.patch
   patch -p1 < some.patch
   

   Or

   git diff --no-prefix > some.patch
   patch -p0 < some.patch