How I Got Out of a Knee Deep Git Problem

Problem

• I am not used to rebasing or squashing commits, my new project strictly follows this hence I was pushed to do this.
• I started with 4 commits which I had to squash
• git rebase -i HEAD~4 and squashed all the commits all were good
• But, as I pushed the code there was a conflict with the master
• If you remember you cannot merge hence I did a git rebase -i master
• Now I ended up having 10 more commits from god knows where
• I cannot push all of them, hence I squashed them all again, in spite of the commits not being mine
• I pushed my code, but the conflict was still there, at the brink of frustration I fixed the conflict in Github and left it there
• As expected, I was asked not to merge from master and revert it
• Now I am knee stuck with a merge, 9 commits squashed within which another 4 commits squashed

Solution - Git Reflog to the rescue

• git reflog has a history of all the commands you ever executed
• On running it I found the first squash I made
• git reset --hard <commit_id> took me to that commit
• One mistake I did last time when I rebased master was I didn't rebase from upstream so this time I ran git pull upstream master --rebase
• Now I did a git add . to add my changes to rebase
• git rebase --continue finishes the rebase successfully
• Finally git push origin --force <branch-name> to push the final version with no-conflicts and just my commits squashed into one.

Comments

[Steve Taylor]

Squashing via git rebase is hard. Do it in easy mode instead:

git fetch
git merge origin/master

If there are conflicts, resolve them and git commit to complete the merge. Then:

git reset --soft origin/master
git commit -m "(your message)"
git push --force

[Darko Mens]

Good to note