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In this article, we'll see how to compare two Git branches using three different techniques.

Get the difference between branches in Git

Git is a famous software that helps us keep track of the changes we make to files and also helps to build a unique version of commit for all the changed files. If something goes wrong, we can easily restore the perfect version of that file in a branch.

We usually use different branches to perform our work exactly and reach tags which are not related to the original files. For such cases, we need to merge all the different branches we created to get the exact output results in our original repository branch.

To do this, we need to sort out the differences between two or more branches.

Merging two branches is important because we should know that there are no conflicts between the branches we are merging and the code is stable before merging the entire content into the master branch.

It is important to check in the most stable code so that the team can continue working, and this should not be a hindrance for them.

git diffCompare two branches in Git using command

When we need to check the differences between two files for merging, we have to run the following command to find the differences and merge them into one file (the most recent changes). We will use git diffthe command to check the differences between two branches.

This command will compare the two branch files, showing us if the contents of the file conflict.

Diffingis a well-known feature in Git that can diff two data sources as input. These data sources can be anything like branches, files, commits, or more code or text related stuff.

For example, if we compare two different branches, i.e. featureand master, we will use the following command to get the differences between the files and codes of these branches.

$ git diff master feature

Comparing two branches in Git using double dot notation

双点The following command can also be used to compare the content in a specific branch by applying between branches .

$ git diff master..feature

There is no difference in the results of the two commands.

The purpose of both these commands is to compare the tips or in other words we can say the latest commits on both branches and tell us the differences.

Comparing two branches in Git using triple dot notation

The comparison performed with triple dot (…) notation will be different from the above two commands.

Note that it does not diff the tips of the two branches, it only featurecompares the tip of the branch with the original commits of both branches.

This command will list all changes made on the branch featuresince development on the branch started.master

The following command compares two branch contents using triple dot notation.

$ git diff master...feature

The two-dot notation command is mainly used to compare the contents of two Git branches.