git rebase with squash

Git is a very powerful tool for source code version control. Often we do POCs and no one whats to waste time while you are doing a POC so often people dont pay much attention to their commit messages(including myself). However the POC grows and you reach the point to productionize the solution, all great but what you do with your poor commit messages? Good messages are critical for good configuration management, release management, and code hygiene. So what can we do? Well git rebase can rescue us. Git rebase is also useful in other use cases where you need to have a specific format of messages because your CI/CD tool does some validations or you are hunting a bug down and you want to drop a bad commit or you are cherry-picking commits to doing a chirurgical release. So I made a short video showing rebase commands in action. We also will use squash which is an interesting way to combine your commits in one for better trackability. So Let's get started.

The Video

The Commands

Figure out the commit range

git log

Squash and edit commit message

###
### Commit RANGE from Older to Newer
###        OLDER commit                             NEW COMMIT 
git rebase 1483870be2e905111234c4a9ce654c3108dcfdbc b9f14b69ba7f62dd6bbcbb986dc0de75a643b14a -i

You will see something like this:

pick fbb89b1 This is a dummy message
pick fbb89b2 This is a dummy message
pick fbb89b3 .
pick fbb89b4 .

Change it to be all "s"(squash) but the first commit "p"(pick):

p fbb89b1 This is a dummy message
s fbb89b2 This is a dummy message
s fbb89b3 .
s fbb89b4 .

Them you will write a commit message:

ARCH-12345: This is a git commit POC 

Shortcut: Get all commits - including the first one

git rebase -i --root

You will see something like this:
```bash
pick fbb89b1 This is a dummy message
pick fbb89b2 This is a dummy message
pick fbb89b3 .
pick fbb89b4 .

Change it to be all "s"(squash) but the first commit "p"(pick):

p fbb89b1 This is a dummy message
s fbb89b2 This is a dummy message
s fbb89b3 .
s fbb89b4 .

Them you will write a commit message:

ARCH-12345: This is a git commit POC 

Origin and our branch out of sync? issues to push to remote? do this!

git push origin -f

Oops - How do I cancel?

git rebase --abort

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Cheers,

Diego Pacheco