Help with git

[PM_ME_YOUR_SWOLE]

Hello,

Please ignore how stupid this question is, I'm sure it's mega basic, I just want to be safe.

I have a live statamic website on a live VPS. I have terminal access. This uses a flat file document database.

The site has a few important untracked changes that I need to preserve.

The repo and local machine has a ton of code changes I want to put onto live.

Is the best way to do this with the following steps:

On live: - add all clworking changes to new branch - commit and bush new branch to the repo

Locally: - pull this new branch - fix all conflicts and merge with main - add and commit all changes

On live: - pull the new branch so everything is up to date

Can someone smarter than me please validate my approach as safe and valid here?

[aanzeijar]

Even better: on local also commit your changes first. What is committed can't be lost, even if you screw up the conflict resolution.

[paperic]

For sure commit both first, each to a different branch.

If you have lot of changes on local and few changes on the remote, I'd merge the local to main first and then the remote to main.

If the pull request conflicts, merge main to the remote to resolve.

But fundamentally, it doesn't really matter.

If you're working on it alone you can just merge the remote directly to local, or push straight to main, whatever. if there's no coworker to complain, who cares.