Abstract
Benefits
Concise History
- Sometimes, there are commits that are used to tested the idea
- If we don’t clean them up, when people branch out, these testing idea commits will follow too which make it harder to read and understand the development of the project
- To prevent meaningless trails and errors commits from polluting the git history, especially when others are branching out
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 History
- Initialise the rebase, include commits between the merged commit(inclusive) and the commit(inclusive) where the feature branch starts
- If we just want to remove the feature branch, we can just save and quite the rebase plan. And it is done