Git Rebase
📌 Covered in this chapter:
Rebase vs Merge · Interactive Rebase · Squashing Commits · Rebase Safety
Rewrite commit history cleanly with git rebase — including interactive rebase for squashing and reordering commits.
1Git Rebase — What You'll Learn
Rewrite commit history cleanly with git rebase — including interactive rebase for squashing and reordering commits.
Here's everything this chapter covers, in the order you'll learn it:
- What rebase does differently from merge
- Rebasing a feature branch onto the latest main
- Interactive rebase (git rebase -i)
- Reordering commits
- Squashing multiple commits into one
- Editing old commit messages
- Resolving conflicts during a rebase
- Continuing a rebase after resolving conflicts
- Aborting a rebase
- The golden rule: never rebase shared/public history
2Working Example
💻 Example: Git Rebase
Bash
git switch feature/java-tutorial
git fetch origin
git rebase origin/main3Best Practices & Common Pitfalls
💡 Key things to remember:
- Rebase creates a clean, linear history by replaying your commits on top of the latest main — but it REWRITES commit hashes, so never rebase a branch that others have already pulled and built on top of.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q What's the most important thing to understand about git rebase?
Focus on: Rebase vs Merge · Interactive Rebase · Squashing Commits · Rebase Safety. These are the core building blocks this chapter's examples are built around, and they show up repeatedly in later chapters of this course.
Q Is git rebase something I'll use often in real projects?
Yes — every concept in this chapter reflects a real, everyday part of professional Git and GitHub workflows, not just a theoretical exercise.