Combining Git Commits: Git Squash

I often work by committing small, incrementally stable portions of my work to my working branch, then pushing the entire thing when it’s done. While great for working, this makes for a very cluttered commit history. Not only that, but it also makes it more difficult for peer reviewers to know what changes you’re trying to commit and contribute. To address this, I did the lazy (yet ironically more work) step of making a copy of my files, making a clean working branch, and applying my accumulation of changes in one copy-paste operation. In other words, I was manually squashing my many commits into one.

Turns out git has this capacity built in. I knew of it, but I never bothered to look into it. Turns out, it was simple, and could’ve saved me a lot of time. This blog post outlines the process:

git rebase -i HEAD~4

With that command to begin interactively picking and squashing the last 4 commits. This is done by changing the commit log from picking the last four commits separately to squashing three onto the most recent. So in the interactive editor, this:

pick 01d1124 Adding license
pick 6340aaa Moving license into its own file
pick ebfd367 Jekyll has become self-aware.
pick 30e0ccb Changed the tagline in the binary, too.

Becomes this:

pick 01d1124 Adding license
squash 6340aaa Moving license into its own file
squash ebfd367 Jekyll has become self-aware.
squash 30e0ccb Changed the tagline in the binary, too.

Just save that, adjust the rebased commit message, and all is well.