How to squash commits in git after they have been pushed?

This gives a good explanation of squashing multiple commits:

but it does not work for commits that have already been pushed. How do I squash the most recent few commits both in my local and remote repos?

When I do git rebase -i origin/master~4 master, keep the first one as pick, set the other three as squash, and then exit (via c-x c-c in emacs), I get:

$ git rebase -i origin/master~4 master # Not currently on any branch. nothing to commit (working directory clean) Could not apply 2f40e2c... Revert "issue 4427: bpf device permission change option added" $ git rebase -i origin/master~4 master Interactive rebase already started 

where 2f40 is the pick commit. And now none of the 4 commits appear in git log. I expected my editor to be restarted so that I could enter a commit message. What am I doing wrong?

10 Answers

Squash commits locally with

git rebase -i origin/master~4 master 

and then force push with

git push origin +master 

Difference between --force and +

From the documentation of git push:

Note that --force applies to all the refs that are pushed, hence using it with push.default set to matching or with multiple push destinations configured with remote.*.push may overwrite refs other than the current branch (including local refs that are strictly behind their remote counterpart). To force a push to only one branch, use a + in front of the refspec to push (e.g git push origin +master to force a push to the master branch).

On a branch I was able to do it like this (for the last 4 commits)

git checkout my_branch git reset --soft HEAD~4 git commit git push --force origin my_branch 

Minor difference to accepted answer, but I was having a lot of difficulty squashing and finally got it.

$ git rebase -i HEAD~4 

• At the interactive screen that opens up, replace pick with squash at the top for all the commits that you want to squash.
• Save and close the editor

Push to the remote using:

$ git push origin branch-name --force 

A lot of problems can be avoided by only creating a branch to work on & not working on master:

git checkout -b mybranch

The following works for remote commits already pushed & a mixture of remote pushed commits / local only commits:

# example merging 4 commits git checkout mybranch git rebase -i mybranch~4 mybranch # at the interactive screen # choose fixup for commit: 2 / 3 / 4 git push -u origin +mybranch 

I also have some pull request notes which may be helpful.

git rebase -i master

you will get the editor vm open and msgs something like this

Pick 2994283490 commit msg1 f 7994283490 commit msg2 f 4654283490 commit msg3 f 5694283490 commit msg4 #Some message # #some more 

Here I have changed pick for all the other commits to "f" (Stands for fixup).

git push -f origin feature/feature-branch-name-xyz

this will fixup all the commits to one commit and will remove all the other commits . I did this and it helped me.

1) git rebase -i HEAD~4

To elaborate: It works on the current branch; the HEAD~4 means squashing the latest four commits; interactive mode (-i)

2) At this point, the editor opened, with the list of commits, to change the second and following commits, replacing pick with squash then save it.

output: Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/branch-name.

3) git push origin refs/heads/branch-name --force

output:

remote: remote: To create a merge request for branch-name, visit: remote: remote:To ip:sc/server.git + 84b4b60...5045693 branch-name -> branch-name (forced update) 

For squashing two commits, one of which was already pushed, on a single branch the following worked:

git rebase -i HEAD~2 [ pick older-commit ] [ squash newest-commit ] git push --force 

By default, this will include the commit message of the newest commit as a comment on the older commit.

When you are working with a Gitlab or Github you can run in trouble in this way. You squash your commits with one of the above method. My preferite one is:

git rebase -i HEAD~4 or git rebase -i origin/master 

select squash or fixup for yours commit. At this point you would check with git status. And the message could be:

 On branch ABC-1916-remote Your branch and 'origin/ABC-1916' have diverged, and have 1 and 7 different commits each, respectively. (use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours) 

And you can be tempted to pull it. DO NOT DO THAT or you will be in the same situation as before.

Instead push to your origin with:

git push origin +ABC-1916-remote:ABC-1916 

The + allow to force push only to one branch.

Sqush Changes in remote

• First ensure your local master is at par with remote
• Then reset your local feature branch to be at par with master: git reset --soft master
• then add all your modifications and changes (that you made on your local feature branch you just reset to master) to staging area: git add .
• then commit these changes: git commit -m "this is the final commit message"
• then force push to remote branch: git push RemoteBranch --force

In my case requirement was to squash all the feature branch commits into one, to have a clean commit history. Utilized the GitHub UI to do so.

Problem:

• Feature branch (eg:featureBranch) has been created from master (a month ago).
• Committed all my changes to the featureBranch (~12 commits, a month of work). And has been pushed to remote regularly.

Requirement:

• To Get the feature branch updated with the master and to have a single commit in a featureBranch

Steps followed:

• Create a new branch (eg: featureBranchLatest) from master in GitHub UI.
• Create a PR from featureBranch to featureBranchLatest.
• Resolve conflicts if any. Merge the PR with the squash commit option in GitHub UI. (Alter the commit message to have a cleaner message).

Now the featureBranchLatest will have a single commit of all the changes needed in a single commit, along with the latest changes from the master. Delete the old branch featureBranch if not required for reference.