Rebase (git)

Rebasing in git is a way to clean up your commit history and change the history of one branch to be after the changes of another. Most commonly, you rebase a feature branch on the end of the master/main branch.

The Golden Rule

If your branch is being worked on by anybody else but you, do not rebase! Because rebase is destructive, you will not be able to reconcile branches with git, leaving you to do the work manually. 💀⚰️

From Linus Torvald[10]:

People can (and probably should) rebase their private trees (their own work). That's a cleanup. But never other peoples code. That's a "destroy history"

Another Good Rule

ALWAYS make a backup of the branch you are trying to rebase with. If you screw it up, the commits are gone. Make a copy (git commit -b branch-name-bak), run your test, ensure it did the thing you wanted it to do, then hold on to your backup in case you were wrong.

Merge vs. Rebase

Merging and rebasing both achieve the same goals, but in different ways. Merging non-destructively maintains the history of the current branch when merging in other branches, with the cost of adding a new merge commit. Rebasing destructively changes the history of the current branch when rebasing on to other branches, but leaves no new commits.

Simple Rebase

To perform a simple rebase and put the commits of the current branch on to the tip of another branch, you can use the following command:

$ git rebase {other-branch}

For instance, if I were on a feature branch and I wanted to rebase on top of the main branch, I would use git rebase main. This will re-write the history destructively and prompt you if there are any conflicts to resolve before proceeding.

Interactive Rebase

To rebase one branch onto the nearest common ancestor of another, use the following command:

$ git rebase -i `git merge-base {other-branch} HEAD`

For instance, if I was on a feature branch and wanted to interactively rebase over all commits that occurred since it branched off of main, it would be git rebase -i `git merge-base main HEAD` .

Note that when the commits are listed, they are listed oldest to newest, unlike the git log which is newest to oldest. This is very important!

Alias

In your ~/.gitconfig file, you can add this in the [alias] section to invoke the above command using git rbm {other-branch}:

rbm = "! f() { git rebase -i `git merge-base ${1} HEAD`; }; f"

Interactive Rebase Commands

I only have used these so far, and they do the job for what I need.

Command(s)	Effect
`p` / `pick`	Keep the commit as it currently is
`r` / `reword`	Keep the commit and edit the commit message
`s` / `squash`	Combine this commit with the previous commit, and edit commit message for newly squashed commit
`f` / `fixup`	Fold this commit into the previous commit, using the previous commit's message
`e` / `edit`	Stop at this commit and give user control until `rebase --continue`[9]

Rebasing Onto Squashed Commits[15-18]

First, MAKE A BACKUP!

Lets say that you had three branches: main, feature, and ft-addition. ft-addition built upon the work of feature.

ft-addition             G-H-I
                       /
feature           D-E-F
                 /
main        A-B-C

We finish with feature and squash it before merging it into main (squashed commit being S.

ft-addition       D-E-F-G-H-I
                 /
main        A-B-C-S

We now have conflicting commit histories. The content of S is all of the commits D, E, F. If we git rebase main while checked out in the ft-addition branch, we would have to deal with conflicts on every commit as it tried to replay D, E, and F on top of S. This would mean lots of unnecessary merge conflict resolution.

To fix this, we can use the --onto flag on git rebase. The syntax is as follows:

$ git checkout starting-branch
$ git rebase --onto target-branch-or-commit commit-to-replay-from

For instance, with our example, we would want to replay commits G, H, and I but not D, E, or F. So we would use:

$ git checkout ft-addition
$ git rebase --onto main F

This replays all commits that are children of commit F onto the commit found at main.

This would result in this structure:

ft-addition         G-H-I
                   /
main        A-B-C-S

We change the parent of commit G from F to S.

Have I Rebased and Merged This Branch?[13]

One problem with a rebase and merge or squash and rebase before merge is that the standard git branch -d branch-name will reject as it is not recognized as merged in to the target branch. A couple ways to check:

Use git log --oneline --cherry target-branch...starting-branch to see which commits are present in both branches.
If commit messages are maybe not true to the original, or a squash and rebase has occurred, you can use git checkout target-branch~0; git merge starting-branch. This will put you on a detached head of the target branch and try to merge in the starting branch's content. If this commit is merged in already, it should say Already up to date..

You can put all of option 2 into a function in your shell as an alias.

grbdiff () {
    local TARGET=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
    local STARTING="$1"

    git checkout "${TARGET}~0" 2>/dev/null
    git merge "${STARTING}" 2>/dev/null
    local DIFF=$(gd --stat)
    if [[ -z "$DIFF" ]]
    then
        echo -e "Branch '${TARGET}' contains contents of '${STARTING}'. Nothing to merge."
    else
        echo -e "Branch '${TARGET}' does not contain contents of '${STARTING}':\n${DIFF}"
    fi

    git checkout "${TARGET}" 2>/dev/null
}

It can be executed by checking out the target branch and typing grbdiff starting-branch. If there are changes, it will print the diff.

Package Lock Conflicts[14]

If you end up with package-lock.json conflicts in a rebase, follow these instructions:

This is given that you are at a state in the rebase where all other previous or current conflicts have been managed and all that is left is the package lock.
Run npm install --package-lock-only.
Stage package-lock.json in the current commit.
Run git rebase continue and commit.

This should render you the up to date package-lock.json file without having to do all the merge conflicts manually.

References

Backlinks

Last modified: 202205100910