What is the difference between merge and rebase in Git?

In Git, merge and rebase are two ways to integrate changes from one branch into another, but they work differently and have different consequences for the commit history.

• Merge combines two branches, creating a new merge commit that preserves the history of both branches. The history remains branched, clearly showing when and how the merge occurred.

• Rebase rewrites the commits of one branch onto another, creating a linear history without merge commits. This makes the history cleaner but changes commit hashes, which can cause issues when collaborating if the branch has already been published.

Example:

# Merge
git checkout feature
git merge main

# Rebase
git checkout feature
git rebase main

Use merge if you want to keep the full merge history, and rebase if you want to make the history more linear and clean before publishing the branch.