如何在保留“最新”提交的同时保留多个“先前”提交？

Question

I had cloned one of Github boilerplate project but forgot to reset the history of the original repo and have been creating quite an amount of commits onto its master branch.

For now my commit history looks like this.

Initial commit - (hundreds of boilerplate commits) - (tens of my commits)

What I'd like to do is to "squash" (or "combine" if "squash" here isn't an appropriate word) all of the commits from the original repo that I've cloned from while leaving my latest commits on history. I was trying to do this by using git rebase --root -i but there're hundreds of commits to squash (the orignal repo) and pick (my own repo) which makes it hard to do it that way.

Is there a convenient way to achieve this? I don't mind if I lose all the history before my own commits start, or if I create a new repo.

Answer 1

In order to do a git squash follow those steps:

// X is the number of commits you wish to squash
git rebase -i HEAD~X

Once you squash your commits - choose the s for squash = it will combine all the commits into a single commit.

Choose pick for the latest commit in order to preserve it.

Answer 2

Assuming the last "boiler plate commit" SHA is abc123 , and your current branch is master , do the following:

git branch my-new-branch master
git checkout abc123 --orphan temp-branch
git commit -m "Initial boilerplate code"
git rebase --onto temp-branch abc123 my-new-branch
git branch -d temp-branch

This will leave you with with my-new-branch pointing to all your commits followed by a single squash commit of the boiler plate code. You can push this branch to a new repo, or (if this is a local only repo, or you don't mind doing a force push) removing master and renaming my-new-branch to master , or whatever.