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Git Rebase

438 words, 3 min read
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Xinyang YU

Important

The golden rule of git rebase is to avoid rebasing public branches to prevent rewriting history that others might rely on.

git rebase should 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 merge to 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 on git bisect, which can be more complex and less intuitive.

Abstract

  • git rebase is 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_COMMITS is 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 e to 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 d to the commit we want to drop

Rewrite commit messages

  • Initialise the rebase, and set r to the commit we want to modify

Combine multiple commits into one

  • Initialise the rebase, and set s to 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 commit error

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

References

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