Git rebase squash all commits in branch, off of another branch, without conflicts

Question

A common development workflow for us is to checkout branch b, commit a bunch to it, then squash all those commits into one (still on b).

However, during the rebase -i process to squash all the commits, there are frequently conflicts at multiple steps.

I essentially want to alter the branch into one commit that represents the state of the repository at the time of the final commit on b

I've done some searching but I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for. I don't want to merge --squash because we would like to test the squashed feature branch before merging.

From that question - I do not want G to be in stable, I want it to still be on the feature branch. Not sure if i'm missing something — Andy Ray
– Andy Ray, Commented Jun 27, 2013 at 22:36
Cherry pick it on what branch? I would like to keep the same branch name — Andy Ray
– Andy Ray, Commented Jun 27, 2013 at 22:44
Why would there be conflicts when squashing? That doesn't make sense to me... — Ajedi32
– Ajedi32, Commented Aug 25, 2014 at 21:27

vabada · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-23 12:21:14Z

If you don't need the commit information, then you could just do a soft reset. Then files remain as they were and when you commit, this commit will be on top of the commit you did reset to.

To find the commit to reset to:

git merge-base HEAD BRANCH_YOU_BRANCHED_FROM

Then

git reset --soft COMMIT_HASH

Then re-craft the commit, perhaps:

git commit -am 'This is the new re-created one commit'

Wow thanks a lot for this. Can you please explain why this doesn't work when you do just a "reset" (without --soft)?
Default is --mixed instead of --soft. Mixed will reset the index and HEAD. Soft will only reset the HEAD. Hard reset will reset WorkingDir + Index + HEAD

ColinM · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-28 22:50:51Z

This is simlar to the answer from Rasmus but broken down into three steps that should always work:

$ git merge feature1 $ git reset --soft HEAD@{1} $ git commit -c feature1

Explanation:

merge and resolve conflicts
keep changes staged but reset to old head
commit all changes using commit message and author from feature branch latest commit

sheerun · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-01 19:44:45Z

I've created a tool specifically for this task:

https://github.com/sheerun/git-squash

For example you can call following to squash all commits from "master" commit up to HEAD, no matter how many conflicts there would be along the way:

git squash master

It's basically what GitHub does when you "squash and merge" pull request.

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