git - Merge development branch with master

Question

I have two branches namely master and development in a GitHub Repository. I am doing all my development in development branch as shown.

git branch development
git add *
git commit -m "My initial commit message"
git push -u origin development

Now I want to merge all the changes on the development branch into the master. My current approach is:

git checkout master 
git merge development
git push -u origin master 

Please let me know if the procedure I am following is correct.

Answer 1

I generally like to merge master into the development first so that if there are any conflicts, I can resolve in the development branch itself and my master remains clean.

(on branch development)$ git merge master
(resolve any merge conflicts if there are any)
git checkout master
git merge development (there won't be any conflicts now)

There isn't much of a difference in the two approaches, but I have noticed sometimes that I don't want to merge the branch into master yet, after merging them, or that there is still more work to be done before these can be merged, so I tend to leave master untouched until final stuff.

EDIT: From comments

If you want to keep track of who did the merge and when, you can use --no-ff flag while merging to do so. This is generally useful only when merging development into the master (last step), because you might need to merge master into development (first step) multiple times in your workflow, and creating a commit node for these might not be very useful.

git merge --no-ff development