In bitbucket/git, how to do fast forward merge after doing a merge-commit?

Question

In bitbucket/git, how to do fast forward merge after doing a merge-commit?

I have branched from develop in to a feature branch.
After few commits on feature branch, i have merged feature branch in to develop - using merge-commit merge strategy of bitbucket pull request.
In the process of development on feature branch I have made few more commits on to feature branch. This time when I want to merge code in to develop branch, I want to use fast-forward merge strategy of bitbucket pull request.

But I am not allow to do this as the first merge was merge-commit.

Could some one explain how to fix this, I now want to use fast-forward merge strategy of bitbucket pull request.

Note: there are no direct commits on to develop branch. And there is only one feature branch for this repo. So the only update to develop branch is through merges from the only one feature branch.

Answer 1

Since develop has a merge commit that does not exist on the feature branch and the feature branch has commits that do not exist on the develop branch, you cannot do a fast forward merge here.

On solution is to rebase your feature branch onto the develop branch:

git checkout feature
git rebase develop

This will create a sequence of commits on top of develop that have the same code changes as the current commits on feature branch. Then it will move the feature branch to point at the tip of that sequence of commits.

Now you will be able to do a fast forward merge because all of the commits on the develop branch are also on the feature branch.