Git rebase将当前分支留在远程后面，想要更清晰的提交历史记录

Question

I upload commits from my local Git repo to GitHub regularly, but it was overloaded with commits, and after deciding they are not useful and just spoil the history, I tried using rebase -i to squash some of the commits together.

It seemed to work, so I wanted to push the changed commits to GitHub and change the history there. What I get is that the tip of my current branch is behind. And the suggested action is to pull changes from the remote repo, but I don't want the changes from the remote. I just want to send what I have locally to GitHub.

Can you please explain me the situation a bit and help to achieve what I want?

Answer 1

To edit some pushed branches is a no-go, however you can do it.

maybe your commit log looks like this:

o 250a32c added new information <master> <origin/master>
|
o c4f5265 added new information
|
o 168d674 added new information
|
o ca708cd some other commit

You can now with interactive rebase squash some commits.

git rebase -i ca708cd

An editor opens and you can change the pick before the commits 250a32c and c4f5265 to squash .

After this, your repo looks like this:

o 3e86bc4 added new information <master>
| o 250a32c added new information <origin/master>
| |
| o c4f5265 added new information
| |
| o 168d674 added new information
|/
o ca708cd some other commit

Now you have to need to push your branch to the github with --force , because your master and master/origin are out of sync and cannot be fast-forwarded.

git push --force origin master

Answer 2

Rewriting history after you have published commit publicly is not a very good thing to do. Imagine someone else cloned your repository. If you change it afterwards, their history wouldn't match their origin (your github repo).

You have several solutions, you can:

• try and go on and change the repo on github. One possibility is to completely discard the branches you don't like on github, and then push your arranged local branches to github (silvio's "--force" being a faster alternative).

• remove the repo completely and clone your local repo to github again.

• live with the not so beautiful commits (preferred solution).