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About Git rebase

The git rebase command allows you to easily change a series of commits, modifying the history of your repository. You can reorder, edit, or squash commits together.

In this article

Typically, you would use git rebase to:

  • Edit previous commit messages
  • Combine multiple commits into one
  • Delete or revert commits that are no longer necessary

Warning

Because changing your commit history can make things difficult for everyone else using the repository, it's considered bad practice to rebase commits when you've already pushed to a repository. To learn how to safely rebase, see Pull request merges.

Rebasing commits against a branch

To rebase all the commits between another branch and the current branch state, you can enter the following command in your shell (either the command prompt for Windows, or the terminal for Mac and Linux):

git rebase --interactive OTHER-BRANCH-NAME

Rebasing commits against a point in time

To rebase the last few commits in your current branch, you can enter the following command in your shell:

git rebase --interactive HEAD~7

Commands available while rebasing

There are six commands available while rebasing:

pick
pick simply means that the commit is included. Rearranging the order of the pick commands changes the order of the commits when the rebase is underway. If you choose not to include a commit, you should delete the entire line.
reword