Git - hide merge commits from upstream

Question

I'm using the following workflow for project on Github.

1. Fork the repository
2. Merge base master to forked master
3. Create a branch from forked master and implement something
4. Create a pull request from my branch to base master
5. After checks and review, maintainer merges my branch to base master .
6. Goto 2.

The problem is 2. At first I wasn't expierenced with git, so I did this via the pull request in my fork. Now I do git pull upstream && git merge upstream/master , which creates a new merge commit. After some such merges, my PRs looks like this:

As you see, there is a bunch of merge commits. It's really ugly, and it may be quite hard to understand what exactly I want to merge. Moreover, this list grows every time I merge base master to my fork.

Is there a way to hide/remove them? At this moment, I can only consider deleting and re-creating fork every time PR is done, but that's not good, because I may work on A, then switch to B, merge B, go back to A etc. git rebase actually doesn't hide them: merged commits are listed in PR with $user authored and $me commited .

Answer 1

To fix your currently "broken" PR, you can squash all your commits into a single commit. You can do this on the command line with git rebase -i , and changing pick to squash on all but the first commit.

GitHub actually implements this for you as well - if you click the dropdown next to the Merge pull request button, there is an option for Squash & merge , which does the same thing.