Fix fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories in Git

Learn how to fix the ‘fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories in Git. This guide covers why the issue occurs and provides step-by-step solutions to resolve it.

Now I’m going to share 3 best ways to fix this fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories and it will get your bug resolved.

Fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories

You might encounter the error fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories when attempting to merge branches or pull from a remote repository. This error occurs when Git detects that the histories of the two repositories are completely separate and cannot be merged automatically.

Solution 1: Using –allow-unrelated-histories

If you are sure that you want to merge two unrelated histories then you can use this:

git pull origin main --allow-unrelated-histories

Solution 2: Manually Merging

If Git still fails to merge, you can:

1. Clone the remote repository separately.
2. Copy your local project files into the cloned repository.
3. Stage and commit the changes:

git add .
git commit -m "Merging unrelated histories"

Push the changes to the remote repository:

git push origin main

Solution 3: Rebase Instead of Merge

If still you don’t get it resolved, you can try rebasing instead of merge to fix the ‘fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories’ error in Git like:

git rebase origin/main

This rewrites your commit history onto the remote repository.

Solution 4: Force Pushing as a Last Resort

If nothing else works, and you are okay with overwriting history, you can use:

git push --force

⚠️ Warning: This can cause data loss and should only be used if you fully understand its impact.

Conclusion

The ‘fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories’ error occurs when Git detects separate project histories. The easiest fix is using the --allow-unrelated-histories flag, but other solutions like rebasing or manual merging can also help.

We recently covered a guide on group policy update here in case you wanna read that.