Squashing Commits with Rebase

Arjit Sharma
01 Min
Development-Plus

When working on a feature, you often make multiple small commits. Instead of merging them all separately, you can squash them into a single meaningful commit using interactive rebase. This makes your Git history cleaner and easier to read.

In order to squash commits we will need reference to

  • Latest commit
  • Oldest commit(can get using command git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD).
git rebase -i $(git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD) HEAD

On using this command, we will get an editable file of all the commits where we can specify the commits we want to -

  • pick → Keep commit as it is.
  • squash (s) → Merge commit with the previous one.
  • drop (d) → Remove commit from history.

Untitled

After editing the file and saving it, Git will prompt you to rewrite the commit message for the squashed commits. Modify the message as needed, then continue:

git rebase --continue

Some points to note -

  • The initial commit must be included since every commit needs a base reference.
  • After rebasing, you may end up in a detached HEAD state because Git moves commits but doesn’t update the branch pointer. To fix this:
git branch -f master
git checkout master