Important
The golden rule of
git rebaseis to avoid rebasing public branches to prevent rewriting history that others might rely on.
git rebaseshould only be applied to local feature branches to keep your feature branch commit history clean.For public branches shared among team members, it’s better to use
git mergeto preserve the integrity of the shared history. This way, when tracing which new feature caused an issue, you can troubleshoot using the merge commits instead of relying just ongit bisect, which can be more complex and less intuitive.
Abstract
git rebaseis a Git command used to rewrite the commit history of a branch by moving its base to a new starting point. This allows you to integrate changes from another branch while maintaining a linear and clean commit history
Basics
Include commits to rebase
git rebase -i HEAD~<NUM_COMMITS>NUM_COMMITSis the number of commits, including the current commit HEAD is pointing to
Check the rebase plan
git rebase --edit-todo
Continue with rebase after resolving a Merge Conflict
git rebase --continue
Abandon this current rebase
git rebase --abort- Use when we messed up, and don’t know what to do
Merge
- On the branch(
FEATURE_BRANCH) we want to merge back:git rebase <MAIN_BRANCH> - Checkout out to
MAIN_BRANCH:git rebase <FEATURE_BRANCH> - Personally I like to have a pull request, merge, then Remove feature branch from Git History
Features
Edit changes in a past commit
- Initialise the rebase, and set
eto the commit we want to modify - After modification, run
git commit --amend - Complete the rebase with
git rebase --continue - This will create a new commit, we can then proceed to rebase again to drop the previous old commits
Drop commits in the commit history
- Initialise the rebase, and set
dto the commit we want to drop
Rewrite commit messages
- Initialise the rebase, and set
rto the commit we want to modify
Combine multiple commits into one
- Initialise the rebase, and set
sto the commit we want to modify
Info
- Make sure the oldest commit in the included commits can’t be squashed
- Or we will get
error: cannot 'squash' without a previous commiterror
Remove feature branch from Git history
- Initialise the rebase, including commits between the merged commit (inclusive) and the commit where the feature branch starts (inclusive)
- If you only want to remove the feature branch, simply save and exit the rebase plan without making any changes. The branch will be effectively removed from the history