Interactive Rebase: Clean up your Commit History

This article is part of our ongoing "Advanced Git" series. Stay tuned for future installments by following Tower on Twitter or subscribing to their newsletter.

Interactive Rebase: Your Git History's Best Friend

Interactive rebase is a powerful Git tool, offering a wide range of options for refining your local commit history before sharing changes with your team. Think of it as the Swiss Army knife of Git commands. Let's explore its capabilities and practical applications.

Advanced Git Series:

1. Part 1: Crafting the Ideal Git Commit
2. Part 2: Mastering Git Branching Strategies
3. Part 3: Enhanced Collaboration with Pull Requests
4. Part 4: Resolving Merge Conflicts
5. Part 5: Rebase vs. Merge: A Detailed Comparison
6. Part 6: Interactive Rebase (You're Here!)
7. Part 7: Cherry-Picking Commits: A Targeted Approach
8. Part 8: Git Reflog: Recovering Lost Commits

Reshaping Your Git History

Interactive rebase empowers you to modify your commit history for improved organization and clarity. Key actions include:

• Adjusting commit messages
• Merging multiple commits
• Splitting and editing existing commits
• Reordering commits
• Removing commits

Important Note: Interactive rebase rewrites your commit history, assigning new hash IDs to affected commits. Since commit IDs are crucial identifiers (SHA-1 checksums), this creates entirely new commits. Therefore, never use interactive rebase on commits already pushed to a shared remote repository. Doing so could disrupt your colleagues' work. Use it to clean up your local history before merging and pushing to a shared branch.

The Interactive Rebase Process

Regardless of the specific operation (deleting, messaging, combining, etc.), the workflow remains consistent:

1. Identify the Commit Range: Determine how far back in your history you need to go.
2. Initiate Interactive Rebase: Start the session to begin editing your history.
3. Manipulate Commits: Reorder, delete, combine, or edit as needed.
4. Review History (Optional): Use git log to examine your project's history before starting.

Let's illustrate with examples:

• Modifying a commit message
• Combining commits
• Splitting a commit
• Deleting a commit

Modifying a Commit Message

For the most recent commit, git commit --amend offers a simpler solution. This opens your default editor to modify the message and content. However, avoid amending pushed commits.

For older commits, use interactive rebase:

git rebase -i HEAD~3

This opens an editor showing the three commits. Change pick to reword to modify the message. Save, close, and edit the message again before saving and exiting.

Combining Two Commits

To combine commits (e.g., "7b2317cf Change the page structure" and "6bcf266 Optimize markup"), determine the base commit and use:

git rebase -i HEAD~3

Change pick to squash on the second commit (combining it with the one above it). Save and close. A new editor window appears to create a combined commit message.

Tower Tip: In Tower, drag and drop commits to squash, or right-click to edit commit messages.

Deleting a Commit

Use the drop keyword to remove a commit:

drop 0023cdd Add simple robots.txt
pick 2b504be Change headlines for about and imprint
pick 6bcf266 Optimizes markup structure in index page

Recovering from Mistakes

If you need to undo an interactive rebase, use:

git rebase --abort

Expanding Your Git Expertise

This covers just a fraction of interactive rebase's capabilities. Explore its full potential and other advanced Git techniques with our free "Advanced Git Kit" (a collection of short videos).

Happy rebasing! Join us next time for more "Advanced Git" insights!

Advanced Git Series:

1. Part 1: Crafting the Ideal Git Commit
2. Part 2: Mastering Git Branching Strategies
3. Part 3: Enhanced Collaboration with Pull Requests
4. Part 4: Resolving Merge Conflicts
5. Part 5: Rebase vs. Merge: A Detailed Comparison
6. Part 6: Interactive Rebase (You're Here!)
7. Part 7: Cherry-Picking Commits: A Targeted Approach
8. Part 8: Git Reflog: Recovering Lost Commits

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