rebase.md

Rebasing

Here's the official documentation on rebasing.

Rebasing is a really really awesome way to change the history of your commits. Rebasing is like merging, as it combines commits, but instead of adding them to your tree, it combines commits. I use this mostly for the command

git rebase -i HEAD~3

Which will take the last (in this case) 3 commits and rebase however I see fit. If you run this command, you'll be prompted with an editor window where you can pick a commit to keep, and squash all others into it. At the end of this process you'll be left with 1 (or however many you left) commit that will have all of the combined changes in a single commit.

There are a ton of upsides and downsides to this strategy, the most notable downside however is that you lose all history of changes that have been made.

You also have to be careful about rebasing after a push. Let's say you have 5 commits, and you're not happy with having a bunch of little commits, and you want to put them all together. If you've already pushed up to a remote git repo, then after you rebase and try to push, it will complain that you're missing changes. The only fix for this at this point is to just

git push -fu origin master

Which forces a push, and forcibly overwrites your previous commit history.

So here's a word of warning

Rebasing is super sexy, but don't do it if you've already pushed.