thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

DevOps & Automation · Intermediate

Fast-Forward Merge

A merge where Git simply moves the branch pointer forward because the target branch has no commits not already in the source.

Definition

No merge commit is created, producing linear history. git merge --no-ff forces a merge commit to record that a feature branch existed.

Example

main is at C3, feature is at C5 built on C3; merging feature fast-forwards main to C5.

Exam tip

Fast-forward is only possible when histories have not diverged.

Related terms