4.10 Rebasing#

Estimated time to complete this notebook: 10 minutes

Rebase vs merge#

A git merge is only one of two ways to get someone else’s work into yours. The other is called a rebase.

In a merge, a revision is added, which brings the branches together. Both histories are retained. In a rebase, git tries to work out

What would you need to have done, to make your changes, if your colleague had already made theirs?

Git will invent some new revisions, and the result will be a repository with an apparently linear history. This can be useful if you want a cleaner, non-branching history, but it has the risk of creating inconsistencies, since you are, in a way, “rewriting” history.

An example rebase#

We’ve built a repository to help visualise the difference between a merge and a rebase, at https://github.com/UCL-RITS/wocky_rebase/blob/master/wocky.md.

The initial state of both collaborators is a text file, wocky.md:

It was clear and cold,
and the slimy monsters

On the master branch, a second commit (‘Dancing’) has been added:

It was clear and cold,
and the slimy monsters
danced and spun in the waves

On the “Carollian” branch, a commit has been added translating the initial state into Lewis Caroll’s language:

'Twas brillig,
and the slithy toves

So the logs look like this:

git log --oneline --graph master

* 2a74d89 Dancing
* 6a4834d Initial state

git log --oneline --graph carollian

* 2232bf3 Translate into Caroll's language
* 6a4834d Initial state

If we now merge carollian into master, the final state will include both changes:

'Twas brillig,
and the slithy toves
danced and spun in the waves

But the graph shows a divergence and then a convergence:

git log --oneline --graph

*   b41f869 Merge branch 'carollian' into master_merge_carollian
|\
| * 2232bf3 Translate into Caroll's language
* | 2a74d89 Dancing
|/
* 6a4834d Initial state

But if we rebase, the final content of the file is still the same, but the graph is different:

git log --oneline --graph master_rebase_carollian

* df618e0 Dancing
* 2232bf3 Translate into Caroll's language
* 6a4834d Initial state

We have essentially created a new history, in which our changes come after the ones in the carollian branch. Note that, in this case, the hash for our “Dancing” commit has changed (from 2a74d89 to df618e0)!

To trigger the rebase, we did:

git checkout master
git rebase carollian

If this had been a remote, we would merge it with:

git pull --rebase

Fast Forwards#

If we want to continue with the translation, and now want to merge the rebased branch into the carollian branch, we get:

git checkout carollian
git merge master

Updating 2232bf3..df618e0
Fast-forward
 wocky.md | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

The master branch was already rebased on the carollian branch, so this merge was just a question of updating metadata (moving the label for the carollian branch so that it points to the same commit master does): a “fast forward”.

Rebasing pros and cons#

Some people like the clean, apparently linear history that rebase provides.

But rebase rewrites history.

If you’ve already pushed, or anyone else has got your changes, things will get screwed up.

If you know your changes are still secret, it might be better to rebase to keep the history clean. If in doubt, just merge.

Squashing#

A second way to use the git rebase command is to rebase your work on top of one of your own earlier commits, in interactive mode (-i). A common use of this is to “squash” several commits that should really be one, i.e. combine them into a single commit that contains all their changes:

git log

ea15 Some good work
ll54 Fix another typo
de73 Fix a typo
ab11 A great piece of work
cd27 Initial commit

Using rebase to squash#

If we type

git rebase -i ab11 # OR HEAD~~

an edit window pops up with:

pick cd27 Initial commit
pick ab11 A great piece of work
pick de73 Fix a typo
pick ll54 Fix another typo
pick ea15 Some good work

# Rebase 60709da..30e0ccb onto 60709da
#
# Commands:
#  p, pick = use commit
#  e, edit = use commit, but stop for amending
#  s, squash = use commit, but meld into previous commit

We can rewrite select commits to be merged, so that the history is neater before we push. This is a great idea if you have lots of trivial typo commits.

pick cd27 Initial commit
pick ab11 A great piece of work
squash de73 Fix a typo
squash ll54 Fix another typo
pick ea15 Some good work

save the interactive rebase config file, and rebase will build a new history:

git log

de82 Some good work
fc52 A great piece of work
cd27 Initial commit

Note the commit hash codes for ‘Some good work’ and ‘A great piece of work’ have changed, as the change they represent has changed.