Squash Your Commits

Do You Commit A Lot?

When I work on a project, I used to commit every little progress, so that I can feel safe to move forward.

But it makes my commit history a mess.

However, git provides a few ways to manage and squash commits, so that I can organize my commit history after I finish a feature.

Let's take a look at how to squash commits.

🚨 Before You Start

Make sure you have committed all your changes, and you are on the branch you want to squash commits.

Squash A Few Latest Commits by Using Git Reset

git reset - Reset current HEAD to the specified state

git reset --soft - Does not touch the index file or the working tree at all (but resets the head to , just like all modes do). This leaves all your changed files "Changes to be committed", as git status would put it.

It is a simple and none-interactive way to squash a few latest contiguous commits.

# Reset a number of current commits, and keep the changes
git reset --soft HEAD~<NUMBER_OF_COMMITS>
# Commit the changes to make a squash
git commit -m 'new commit message'

If Anything Goes Wrong

Don't freak out.

You can use git reset 'HEAD@{1}' reset your reset, according to this answer on stackoverflow. 'HEAD@{1}' is the state of HEAD 1 moves ago, you can find it by using git reflog.

git reflog - Manage reflog information

Squash Commits Interactively by Using Git Rebase

git rebase - Reapply commits on top of another base tip

This is an interactive way to squash picked commits.

To do so, please run the following command:

# rebase a number of commits from current commit
git rebase -i HEAD~<number of commits>
# For example, if you want to squash the last 3 commits, run:
git rebase -i HEAD~3

Now you will see an editor with a list of commits you can pick to squash.

pick 1a2b3c4 commit message 1
pick 4d5e6f7 commit message 2
pick 7g8h9i0 commit message 3

To squash picked commits, you simply need to replace the word pick at the beginning of each line to squash or s, except the first line.

pick 1a2b3c4 commit message 1
- pick 4d5e6f7 commit message 2
+ sqush 4d5e6f7 commit message 2
- pick 7g8h9i0 commit message 3
+ s 7g8h9i0 commit message 3

Then save and exit git editor, you will see another new editor to commit the squash changes.

If you squashed a number of none-contiguous commits, you will be asked a few times to commit the squash changes.

If Anything Goes Wrong

Don't panic, you can always run the following command to fix or reset state:

• git rebase --abort to abort the rebase
• git rebase --continue to continue the rebase.
• git rebase --skip to skip the current commit.
• git rebase --edit-todo to edit the todo list.
• git rebase --show-current-patch to show the current patch.