Why You Need to Sync Production Back Into Dev

#git

About our git workflow, we first merge a feature into develop, then the feature into production, then we need to update dev by merging production into dev.

The question here: why do we need that last PR if the feature is already on both branches?

The short answer

Git tracks commits, not just code. Both branches have your code, but they have different merge commits. Without syncing, they drift apart and cause unnecessary conflicts later.

What actually happens

You work on FEATURE-123.

Step 1 — Merge FEATURE-123 into dev. GitHub creates merge commit A: "feature was merged into dev."

Step 2 — Merge FEATURE-123 into production. GitHub creates merge commit B: "feature was merged into production."

A and B are two different commits even though the code inside is the same. Dev knows about A but has no idea B exists.

Why it matters

With one person it's barely noticeable. But in a team:

Dev A merges to production — commit X
Dev B merges to production — commit Y
Dev C merges to production — commit Z

None of those exist in dev. Git now sees two branches with very different histories. Next merge into dev? Fake conflicts — not from code differences, but from mismatched history.

The fix

After every merge to production, sync it back:

production → dev

This tells dev: "here are production's commits too, stay aligned." Usually it's a trivial merge with no actual code changes — just history alignment.

Automate it

A simple GitHub Actions workflow can do this automatically:

name: Sync production → dev

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - production

jobs:
  sync-dev:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Merge production into dev
        run: |
          git config user.name "github-actions[bot]"
          git config user.email "github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"

          git checkout dev
          git merge origin/production --no-edit --ff

          if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
            echo "Merge conflict — resolve manually."
            git merge --abort
            exit 1
          fi

          git push origin dev

No extra setup needed — GitHub gives every workflow a built-in token with push access.

TL;DR

Same code, different merge commits. Sync production into dev to keep histories aligned and avoid fake conflicts.

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