You might feel the things you are doing are just repetive and functional (but old!), after you get familiar using git regularly. You will face a situation where you need to make some specific adjustements to the commits or something similar. It is doable but more manual, you’d wish if there’s a feature that can accomplish what you want to do now.

Among all that you have wished, the rebase is one of them!

What is rebase?

From my understanding I can’t mention a specific definition for this, but let’s keep this simple and let me phrase that in my own sentence.

It does exactly as it sounds, because it picks the current branch(A) and places it on top of the specified branch(B).

i.e, All the changed that were made inside the A branch will be stacked on top of the branch B.

Apart from that, we can do so many things by using rebase,

  • git pull --rebase upstream main - To pull the upstream branch to local by rebasing local branch on top of the upstream branch. (i.e, local branch changes will be stacked on top of the incoming branch)
  • git rebase -i HEAD~8 - To make changes to commit you have made, such as squash, edit, pick…

Make Changes to the Commits by rebase

Determine the number of commits you need to process first,

git log --oneline --decorate

5bb8375 (HEAD -> main, orign/main, orign/HEAD, restic) posts: published jrnl along with featured image
ee0dcb2 (orign/restic) revamp: major changes made to title and tags were added based on the post
a3efcb5 posts: added restic backup with a feature image
2ae860b update: added feature image for git usage post
1b5cef8 update: image feature image added for omv post
21aaf5a update: publishing the omv post

It displays the commit in short format, and determine the amount of commit that needs to be processed.

We need to remove the commit and it’s changes on “a3efcb5 posts: added restic backup with a feature image” from the history. So let’s rebase only 3 three commits (top to bottom), remove the commit from the line and save the changes.

Rebase:

git rebase -i HEAD~3

5bb8375 posts: published jrnl along with featured image
ee0dcb2 revamp: major changes made to title and tags were added based on the post
- a3efcb5 posts: added restic backup with a feature image

Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/main.

Make Changes Across All Commits

We need to remove a directory/file from all/specific commits, and let’s remove a file named hugo.yaml.

git log --oneline --decorate

a3efcb5 posts: added restic backup with a feature image
2ae860b update: added feature image for git usage post
1b5cef8 update: image feature image added for omv post

We’ll be removing hugo.yaml from the last 2 commits.

Rebase into each commit, make changes & save

git rebase -i HEAD~3

pick a3efcb5 posts: added restic backup with a feature image
- pick 2ae860b update: added feature image for git usage post
- pick 1b5cef8 update: image feature image added for omv post
+ edit 2ae860b update: added feature image for git usage post
+ edit 1b5cef8 update: image feature image added for omv post

Replace pick with edit to the commits you want to make changes. Save the changes after modifying it.

Stopped at 2ae860b...  update: added feature image for git usage post
You can amend the commit now, with

git commit --amend 

Once you are satisfied with your changes, run

git rebase --continue
  • We are dropped at the commit 2ae860b (as a temporary branch).
  • Remove the file/folder you want and git commit --amend.
  • Continue rebasing to the next commit 1b5cef8 using git rebase --continue.
  • Repeat this step, until you finish all the edit.