Git is a very powerful tool, but we usually use only couple of commands from it – git pull , git push , git checkout , git fetch and couple more, but we are often intimidated by not so common operations. I would like to explain one step forward from the basics here – what merging actually does, how to rebase, how to cherry-pick commits from another branch and how to clean your pull request. Most of these things rewrite the history, and might look scary because of that, but I hope this guide will help you to become more confident using git.

I am not a git professional by any means, and my usage of git is for sure pretty simple and naïve compared to many other experienced engineers. There are likely some mistakes (or at least non-precise definitions), feel free to contact me at seva.zaikov@gmail.com!

Short Overview

Git is a version control system, which holds all information (both meta and actual data) inside internal blobs. These blobs are not huge, because every commit is not just a single blob, containing everything (unless it is a first commit in the repository), rather list of commits, which should be applied one by one – these blobs contain only differences between commits!

It also means that in order to revert one commit back, we just need to remove all changes stored in the last commit. Same works for any number of commits, even up to the very first commit – we can easily move back and forth by commit hashes.

Git keeps all info inside .git directory, and you can actually explore it! You can parse blobs by yourself to see diffs; you can even apply changes manually there – that is what git does internally.

Git makes it very easy to create new branches, and it encourages to use them for literally everything. It is a big help for distributed development, when a lot of people work on independent branches, and sync only in the end, fixing conflicts in files, where exactly the same lines were changed. Branch itself is just a pointer to a commit’s hash, so we can move them without any problems. It also means that when you remove the branch, it does not really mean that – we removed the pointer, but commit still exists, and knowing the hash, we can set the same pointer back (or another pointer, for the new branch). Tags are also just pointers, and the single difference with branches is that they are not fluid – we tag certain commit, and it sticks with it, and branch pointer automatically moves forward after we add a new commit.

Because branches are just pointers to commits, it means that you can merge not with another branch, rather with a last commit from this branch, and it will be exactly the same thing!

Merging

I’d explain here only the situation when you have your branch with new commits, and you want to merge it back to the master. So, if everything is alright and you have no conflicts with master, when you can just switch to the master and merge your original branch:

1 2 3 4 5 git checkout master # Switched to branch 'master' git merge feature/my-awesome-feature # Updating 49fa574..5ec9036 # Fast-forward

After that git will offer you to create a new commit with default merging message. If it is possible to fast-forward (so no other commits were introduced in the target branch), no new commit will be created (it is a default behaviour). However, you can enforce to create a merge commit anyway (it is a default behaviour of github, for instance), you just need to pass --no-ff argument.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 git checkout master # Switched to branch 'master' git merge --no-ff feature/my-awesome-feature # ===================== # Our editor will automatically open: Merge branch 'feature/my-awesome-feature' # Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary, # especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic branch. # # Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts # the commit.

Also, because we introduce a new commit, it means that we can affect not only a commit message, but actual content of the commit. In order to do that, you have to add --no-commit flag, which will stage everything, but will not create a commit yet – you can look around, run your code, change some files, and commit everything after it:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 git checkout master # Switched to branch 'master' # you don't need --no-ff flag, if there are new commits in master # otherwise, it will be fast-forwarded git merge --no-commit --no-ff feature/my-awesome-feature # ===================== # now we have all changes staged, but not commited # we can change files, fix conflicts, etc git commit # regular commit, if no -m option, message will be prefilled # ===================== # Our editor will automatically open: Merge branch 'feature/my-awesome-feature' # # It looks like you may be committing a merge. # If this is not correct, please remove the file # .git/MERGE_HEAD # and try again. # Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting # with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit. # # On branch master # All conflicts fixed but you are still merging. # # Changes to be committed: # new file: new-awesome-file #

If you have a conflict, git will behave similarly to --no-commit option – it will stage everything, mark all files where conflicts appear, and leave you in this state. You have to resolve all conflicts, stage these files, and commit it as a normal commit (message will be prefilled in your editor as well). Interesting that you can do it using both approaches – you can merge target branch to your current branch and resolve all conflicts there, or do it in the target one. Since all changes are usually made using mechanism of Pull Requests on the service like Github or Bitbucket, the first approach is the most common. These services actually prohibit you to merge to the arget branch, until you resolve all conflicts!

if you ended up in conflicts and feeling like to start from the beginning again, just type git merge --abort , it will try to restore the previous state. However, as authors tell in the docs, be careful if you have a lot of uncommited changes, they might be lost

All the time when we are using git commit to finish merging, with 2.12+ version we can use git merge –continue. It adds a bit more consistent syntax with other commands, like rebase and cherry-pick .

Another useful flag while merging is a --squash option. It allows you to squash all commits from your branch to a single one, and in your target branch you will not receive any other commits at all. In practice it means that after you apply this command, you end up with all changes staged, but with not a single new commit – after everything looks good, you commit a new regular commit, and it is the only one new commit which we add to the history:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 git checkout master # Switched to branch 'master' git merge --squash feature/my-awesome-feature # Updating 27fc6c4..fbe93f3 # ===================== # now we have all changes staged, but not commited # also, no new commits were introduced - we have all changes # staged, and all commit messages will be reflected in editor git commit # single new commit, message will be prefilled # ===================== # Our editor will automatically open: Squashed commit of the following: commit fbe93f3c45781e9dd12aab59728576fa0c0489fa Author: Vsevolod Zaikov <seva.zaikov@gmail.com> Date: Fri Nov 17 18:01:55 2017 +0100 add tests for email service commit 421e83d1a5b4c0eb56fb1690916750f7f1e12fec Author: Vsevolod Zaikov <seva.zaikov@gmail.com> Date: Fri Nov 17 18:01:20 2017 +0100 add email service # Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting # with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit. # # On branch master # Changes to be committed: # modified: email-service # modified: email-service.spec

prefilled message for commit will contain all other commit messages in the description, so you can find them later

Git stores all commits and branches (which are just pointers to commits) in a form of a tree, so when we want to merge something, git starts to go back in the history of both branches, trying to find common ancestor. As soon as he finds one, he puts all new commits from both branches together and starts to apply them. We might encounter a conflict here, if new commits in both source and target branches changed same lines – git by default has no idea how he should deal with such situations, and it is only us who have to decide. Because there was a conflict, we can’t skip the commit – we need to apply new changes, and we need a new blob for them, and new hash for this blob, which is an id for this commit.

Rebasing

So far so good, that was pretty much basic stuff – I think this is how majority of git users use it. So, typical workflow is something like:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 git checkout -b feature/my-new-feature # Switched to a new branch 'feature/my-new-feature' git add . # stage everything git commit -m "add possibility to automatically retry AJAX calls" git merge origin/master # merge with remote master if needed git push # push all changed, and merge it after code review and CI

However, using this strategy we can end up with some commits which we don’t necessarily want. For instance, we might want some functionality from the 3rd branch, and we merged it several times with our branch. It was merged to the master before ours, so our branch will merge to the master just fine, but these commits don’t really give a lot of helpful information. Another type of commits which are common but not so helpful – different variations of “fix”, “fix after code review”, “fix failing tests”, where we apply some small changes which we forgot to fix our tests, linting or some improvements after code review. We can have several rounds of code review, depending on the size, and while we can just amend new changes into one commit of such type, but it might harden the review (people won’t be able to see only the last commit), and we still will have one more commit (not mentioning that granularity of commits for the branch and for the master might be different).

Both Github and Bitbucket offer you a “squash” button, which squashes all your commits into just one merge commit and puts all other commit messages into additional commit message. I personally find it as not very readable, and, moreoever, you might actually want to preserve some commits, so it will be easier in the future to search through and reason about them.

if you write your commit message in an editor, you can insert two newlines after your message, and type a long explanation, which will be visible in a full log. It might help in the future, because you can write all reasoning about choices there – and unlike PRs, it will remain in the git’s history forever

The answer is rewriting history, or rebasing some of your commits. It makes sense to ensure that nobody actively works on the branch when you are performing this operations – so, ideally you rewrite the history which is only local to you, or before merging your branch.

Rewriting history is a dangerous thing, because you can mess other people’s branches – their new commits will have unexisting ancestors, and it is always pain in the neck. However, you can still deal with it using cherry-picking (which I’ll cover in the following section), but it is an additional work anyway, so be extra careful!

One way to use rebase is to rebase target branch to your current one. Using this method, we’ll put all commits which were added after we started our branch (e.g. several merged branches) in the history before our first commit, so our branch will look like we just started after all current commits in target branch and then added all our commits. It will mess up chronological order, but usually not very much, because long-term branches are not that common. In the CLI it will look like:

1 2 # we are in our feature/my-awesome-feature branch git rebase origin/master

If there is no conflicts, this will be enough. However, if any conflicts, it will look like a little bit different from merging. So, what git does internally, it gets target’s pointer and starts to apply our new commits one-by-one. Each time we encounter a conflict, we have to resolve it before applying new commit. So, workflow with several conflicts will look like:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 # we are in our feature/my-awesome-feature branch git rebase origin/master # fix conflicts git add ... # add all files with resolved conflicts git commit # commit message will be prefilled in the editor git rebase --continue # fix conflicts git add ... # add all files with resolved conflicts git commit # commit message will be prefilled in the editor git rebase --continue # done

In case you mess things up and want to start from the beginning again, no worries! Similar to merging, you can abort the process and return to initial state:

1 git rebase --abort

It will revert everything to your original branch, before you started to rebase, so you can start over (or choose other strategy).

Rebasing applies all your commits one-by-one, and it changes the history in the sense that because they have different ancestor now, commit hash is different now, so all your commits will have different hashes. Effectively it means that your branches have diverged, and now you can do two things:

remove remote branch and push your rebased one

push your rebased version with force

Removing involves too much hassle, so force push is a common approach:

1 2 3 git push --force origin feature/my-awesome-feature # or alternative syntax git push origin +feature/my-awesome-feature

I personally like the latter form more, but they are absolutely equivalent, so it is just a personal preference.

Interactive Rebase

Rebase has several very interesting options, but I’ll focus only on one of those – interactive mode.

In the previous section we covered how to rebase target branch, so all our commits in the history will be after recently added to the target branch (like other merged branches after we started our own). But we still have no idea how to rewrite history of our branch and how to remove unwanted commits. Interactive mode helps us exactly with it.

We get into interactive rebase mode just adding -i flag, and we could do it in the previous chapter:

1 2 3 # we can rebase using local master, but then we # need to pull all changes first git rebase -i origin/master

However, interactive rebase usually is used for changing only our branch, so I will explain how to do so using this task. Let’s imagine we have our branch with 4 commits, which we want to combine together before merging into master. So, in order to start interactive rebase of our branch, we need to pick the first commit, which we want to remain untouched (the last one in target branch usually). We can provide a hash, but we can just use git’s references:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 git rebase -i HEAD~4 # get commit which is 4 commits # behind from the last in the current branch git rebase -i ac7xq98 # will work the same way, if # ac7xq98 is a commit before 4 our new commits # ===================== # Our editor will automatically open: pick 9dcb655 add support for deep links pick 7536a6b extend support for android integration pick 01e8299 fix failing tests pick ef5a6ae changes after code review # Rebase 5060ce6..ef5a6ae onto 5060ce6 (4 commands) # # Commands: # p, pick = use commit # r, reword = use commit, but edit the commit message # e, edit = use commit, but stop for amending # s, squash = use commit, but meld into previous commit # f, fixup = like "squash", but discard this commit's log message # x, exec = run command (the rest of the line) using shell # d, drop = remove commit # # These lines can be re-ordered; they are executed from top to bottom. # # If you remove a line here THAT COMMIT WILL BE LOST. # # However, if you remove everything, the rebase will be aborted. # # Note that empty commits are commented out

As you can see, git provides you a quick description to all possible options, and they are pretty self-explanatory. In the editor we need to replace pick with options we want to apply. You can use shorthand versions as well, with just one letter, there is no difference at all. So, let’s work on our branch and change it:

1 2 3 4 reword 9dcb655 add support for deep links squash 7536a6b extend support for android integration edit 01e8299 fix failing tests fixup ef5a6ae changes after code review

So, we blend second commit into the first one, but saving its messaging in description, and fourth commit into the third, throwing message away.

we did not remove (or commented out) any line, doing that would result in losing actual changes - we are going to apply commit diffs one by one, so any removed line means this commit will be lost.

However, we chose edit option for the third commit - it is a similar behaviour to --no-commit option for merging strategy: we stage all the changes, and when we commit, message will be prefilled, but we can play around and change something, if we want to.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 git rebase -i HEAD~4 # start to rebase our branch # chose as on the picture # editor will be opened immediately to change first commit # now we on the 3rd step. we can play around, change files, # add new ones, etc. As soon as we ready to continue: git rebase --continue # change commit message for the third commit # ===================== # Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/master. # done!

We rebased master to our branch, and now new transformed 6 commits in our branch to just 3, more meaningful and not so focused on implementation details. Now we can merge it to the master and have better history in the future, so somebody who will support it can say thanks to us!

Cherry-Pick

Rebasing will solve 95% of our interactions with history, when we want to put other commits before ours, or we want to rewrite our commits to make more sense for the master branch, not just for development. But sometimes we digress too much, and either the whole branch becomes irrelevant, or we just apply too much of unnecessary stuff; some code we’d like to save, though (and we know exactly which commits are interesting for us).

While can we can definitely just copy needed stuff by hand, or rewrite, there is another option which is called cherry-picking. It does exactly as it is named – we pick one (or two, or range) commit, just by hash, and apply to our current branch. Git will get the diff stored in the blob of given commit, and try to apply it to our current one, and if we have any conflicts, we’ll resolve them in a usual way. Commit will have the same commit message, so if you want to change it, you can do interactive rebase with reword option (in case you cherry-picked several commits), or just git commit --amend , which will open an editor and you will be able to rewrite the message.

This is not the most common operation, so people in general are not very keen on it, but in reality there is nothing to worry about. All you need just a hash of your commit, and that is it!

1 git cherry-pick a523xct # put your hash commit here

That will do the trick, that simple! In case you have several commits, you can apply them one by one, or use range of commits.

How to get commit hash? You can switch to your branch, and open git log , which will show all your commits, and you can pick needed hashes. In case commits are pushed somewhere, and you know name of the branch, you can either fetch the branch and checkout there, or just go to the web interface and check commits in this branch.

In case your branch is only local, you can get list of all local branches using git branch (in case you want to see also remote branches, use git branch --all ). And the last case, when the local branch was removed, all information can be found in git reflog, which contains all information about head reference (active commit). It stores all information for about 30 days, so you can find checkout to another branch, or needed commit, and it will contain a hash which you need.

As I said, this is a pretty rare operation, but sometimes it can save you a lot of time and headache, especially if changes are not trivial and located in several commits. Hope one day this short guide will help you!