How to resolve package-lock.json conflicts

Important

The following guide has been created for coding bootcamp participants who are new to Git and NPM and not comfortable with CLI tools. Not intended for professional developers.

It is not possible to resolve conflicts of package-lock.json in GitHub's merge tool and you need to do a manual merge.

1. Update the master branch with the latest changes:

   git checkout master
   git pull
   

2. Merge your feature branch into master:

   git merge mybranch
   

   You will see something like the following message:

   Auto-merging package-lock.json
   CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in package-lock.json
   Auto-merging package.json
   CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in package.json
   Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
   

3. Open your editor (e.g. VSCode) and:
   • Carefully resolve conflicts in package.json (if there is any)
   • Ignore the conflicts in package-lock.json
4. Install packages, which will re-generate package-lock.json:

   npm install
   

5. "Test drive" your application to make sure the conflicts in package.json have been resolved correctly.
6. If the application is able to start up (i.e. there are no missing dependencies), add all changes and finish the merge:

   git add --update
   git commit
   

   ⚠️ Make sure not to commit the *.orig files!
7. If everything looks fine, push to GitHub:

   git push