6 posts tagged with "rebase"

Rebasing is not recommended in two primary situations: when you are working on a public or shared branch and when the rebase operation would cause a significant loss of historical context.

How to Undo a Git Rebase​

Undoing a git rebase is a common task, especially if you've made a mistake or the rebase process introduced unexpected issues. The method you use depends on the state of your repository and whether you've pushed the changes to a remote repository.

Is rebase better than merge?​

Neither rebase nor merge is inherently "better"; they are different tools used for different purposes in Git. The choice between them depends on your workflow, your team's preferences, and whether you want a clean, linear history or an accurate, chronological record of events (3).

Rebasing a local branch onto a remote branch is a common workflow for keeping your feature branch up-to-date with the main development branch (like main or master) and maintaining a clean, linear commit history.

The process involves a few key steps: fetching the latest changes, checking out your local branch, performing the rebase, handling conflicts, and then force-pushing your changes if the branch was already shared.

Does git rebase affect other branches?

Yes, git rebase can affect other branches, but only if you rebase a branch that other developers have already pulled and started working from. Rebasing a local, unshared branch has no impact on other branches in the repository.

The key to understanding this lies in how rebase works. It rewrites the commit history of a branch by moving its commits to a new base. When you run git rebase, you're essentially creating a new set of commits that replace the original ones.

You want to bring your feature branch up to date with the latest main, but you don’t want messy merge commits.

The solution: rebase.

Rebase reapplies your local commits on top of the latest main from remote. It keeps your commit history clean, linear, and easy to read — especially when preparing a pull request.