--rebase

I helped a co-worker resolve a botched git rebase today. My advice for it was as follows:

If you’ve got a topic branch you’ve already merged into master, rebasing master onto that branch later will be the stuff of nightmares. You’ll get a conflict against every commit you previously made on your topic branch. At that point, you have to stick with your strategy of merging.

A better way to go about it is to frequently rebase master onto your topic branch:

git fetch; git rebase origin/master

Then when you’re done, on master squash your commits:

git checkout master; git pull --rebase

git merge --squash topic-branch

git commit -m 'rebasing is better. did this thing on topic-branch'

Which will be a fast-forward, so there’ll be no merge commit. It’ll make you look smart, have a clean and linear git history, and improve your love life. Two of those things are true.

Hey, I'm Ian. I build websites and write about what I learn as I go. Follow me on Twitter.