git merge commits github

gist.github.com › gembin › e0fd1e176f978ecbf1da5baef26f5b2c

Git merge commits into one · GitHub

Git merge commits into one. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Git

git-scm.com › docs › git-merge

Git - git-merge Documentation

Incorporates changes from the named commits (since the time their histories diverged from the current branch) into the current branch. This command is used by git pull to incorporate changes from another repository and can be used by hand to merge changes from one branch into another.

Discussions

How to merge a specific commit in Git - Stack Overflow

I have forked a branch from a repository in GitHub and committed something specific to me. Now I found the original repository had a good feature which was at HEAD. I want to merge it only without previous commits. What should I do? I know how to merge all commits: git branch -b a-good-feature ... More on stackoverflow.com

stackoverflow.com

git - Squash all my commits into one for GitHub pull request - Stack Overflow

Squash-merging can be easily done in many GIT-applications, such as Github Desktop. The only downside is that now you have two branches, but if you don't need to keep your original commits, you can safely delete the original one after squash-merging into the new one. More on stackoverflow.com

stackoverflow.com

Merge Commit, Squash, or Rebase: how do you close Pull Requests on GitHub?

Always commit work as soon as possible, even if you're in the middle of something and don't have working product yet. always make separate branches for separate changes, and keep the change in each branch relatively small. Create a MR as soon as your change works and the pipeline (including testing, linting, etc) works. If you follow the above strategies, i think squash commits really are the best option. You don't clutter your history with loads of small "low information" commits, you dont end up seeing a line of code first entered in a commit only to realize it was 5 commits later when the code actually ran succesfully. Instead, you have a clear commit where the new functionality was added, and that commit contains working code and unit tests. In fact, if your tasks are defined small and clear enough, any time you have a working addition to your codebase, that should probably be exactly the moment your task is done and you want to start a MR(excluding unit tests, documentation and linting). So in theory all the commits you 'cut out' are only commits that don't have a working product in them anyway. Of course, if your assumptions dont work, and you have longer lived branches or big MRs with multiple/bigger features, or with multiple people adding multiple different things to one branch, you'll lose a lot of info with squash commit. More on reddit.com

r/opensource

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December 30, 2022

How do I rebase multiple merge commits into a single one?

You can create first a local backup of you branch with git checkout mybranch && git checkout -b mybackup. Then you can do an interactive rebase where you can choose what to do with each of your commits: keep them as they are, squash, drop with git checkout mybranch && git rebase mymasterbranch -i More on reddit.com

r/git

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Videos

05:00

28 - Combining Commits with Squash | Git Course - YouTube

March 7, 2025

02:30

How to Squash and Merge Git Commits Using GitHub Desktop - YouTube

February 23, 2025

01:12

What is a Merge Commit in Git? - YouTube

May 16, 2024

youtube.com

Git MERGE vs REBASE: Everything You Need to Know

06:09

How to Close a Pull Request - Merge Commit vs Squash vs Rebase ...

How to Merge Git Commits - YouTube

docs.github.com › en › repositories › configuring-branches-and-merges-in-your-repository › configuring-pull-request-merges › configuring-commit-merging-for-pull-requests

Configuring commit merging for pull requests - GitHub Docs

On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings. Under "Pull Requests", select Allow merge commits.

GeeksforGeeks

geeksforgeeks.org › git › how-to-merge-commits-in-git

How to Merge Commits in Git? - GeeksforGeeks

July 23, 2025 - Whether you’re squashing commits, using interactive rebase, or performing a fast-forward merge, understanding these techniques will help you keep your repository organized and efficient. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can confidently manage your commit history and improve your workflow. Comment · Git Introduction · Git Introduction5 min read · Introduction to Github3 min read ·

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 881092 › how-to-merge-a-specific-commit-in-git

How to merge a specific commit in Git - Stack Overflow

freecodecamp.org › news › git-squash-commits

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git cherry-pick should be your answer here.

Apply the change introduced by an existing commit.

Do not forget to read bdonlan's answer about the consequence of cherry-picking in this post:
"Pull all commits from a branch, push specified commits to another", where:

A-----B------C
 \
  \
   D

becomes:

A-----B------C
 \
  \
   D-----C'

The problem with this commit is that git considers commits to include all history before them

Where C' has a different SHA-1 ID.
Likewise, cherry picking a commit from one branch to another basically involves generating a patch, then applying it, thus losing history that way as well.

This changing of commit IDs breaks git's merging functionality among other things (though if used sparingly there are heuristics that will paper over this).
More importantly though, it ignores functional dependencies - if C actually used a function defined in B, you'll never know.

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You can use git cherry-pick to apply a single commit by itself to your current branch.

Example: git cherry-pick d42c389f

freeCodeCamp

Git Squash Commits – Squashing the Last N Commits into One Commit

March 22, 2023 - You can also combine multiple commits into one when you’re about to merge branches. This helps clean up the incoming branch of redundant commits. The downside of this approach is that you don’t have much control as you do with rebase. To do this, I’m going to undo the squashing I did in the last step by running git reset --hard HEAD@{7}. Running git log --oneline again, I can see all the commits once more: I pushed the branch to GitHub again, so I can see those commits there too:

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 14534397 › squash-all-my-commits-into-one-for-github-pull-request

git - Squash all my commits into one for GitHub pull request - Stack Overflow

reddit.com › r/opensource › merge commit, squash, or rebase: how do you close pull requests on github?

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Just a simple addition to help someone else looking for this solution. You can pass in the number of previous commits you would like to squash. for example,

git rebase -i HEAD~3

This will bring up the last 3 commits in the editor.

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ok I figured it out ... First I had to write git rebase -i xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx where xxxxxxxxxx is the SHA of the commit upto which I've to squash. Then in Notepad I edited the first as pick and rest of all as squash. Then a new notepad window will come and there in the first line I typed the name of my new commit. And then I had to do a force push :

git push --force origin master

Find elsewhere

Google Bing Mojeek

r/opensource on Reddit: Merge Commit, Squash, or Rebase: how do you close Pull Requests on GitHub?

December 30, 2022 -

When Merging a Pull Request on GitHub, you mainly have three options: merge commit, squash or rebase.

Is there anything wrong with always doing a merge commit? Well, there isn’t right or wrong here, but considering the other strategies will likely bring you some benefits.

I made a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFRtsiQEJZw

In the video, I will go into detail about the three strategies, and I will also do a "live demo" with GitHub stickers and JS pins, if you're curious I'd recommend you to watch the video, otherwise you can find the full-text content here below.

Merge Commit

Merge commit is probably the most common as it’s the default option on GitHub and also the default behavior when you manually use git merge.

The history of all your commits remains untouched and on the main branch, you see an additional commit that merges all your branch content.

The biggest advantage is that you can easily track down the exact commit where a line has been modified, as long as there aren’t too many commits.

The downside is that when multiple commits are on multiple branches, the history quickly becomes really tangled, and following the path of a change can be quite a challenge.

Squash merge

The question is, do you really need to keep track of every single commit? Including typos, missing files, formatting… if the answer is no, then you should consider Squash merge.

When squashing a merge, the result is that you get rid of all commits on the branch and only add a single commit on main with all the content.

As a result, the history is much cleaner and while working on a branch you can do all the commits you want since you know that with the squash all your sins will be forgotten. Kind of.

Who doesn’t like squash merge, usually brings up the fact that you’re losing a lot of commit history, but it’s up to you if you think commits on a branch are valuable when reviewing old activity or rather is just noise.

Rebase

A third way is that you don’t really need a commit that indicates a merge took place, and you still want to end up having all commits in a single, straight line.

Merge commit has all tangled lines plus an extra commit, Squash is a straight line but loses the history so here comes Rebase, which keeps the history AND the straight line AND doesn’t require an extra commit for the merge.

Does this make Rebase the best strategy ever? Well... actually not necessarily, because it has some potentially destructive side effects.

If you get a merge conflict during a rebase, it’s fairly easy to unintentionally lose parts of your code code and if you need to catch up on multiple commits you might end up resolving a merge conflict for every single commit, rather than just one in the other merge strategies.

My two cents

After this overview, what do you think? Let me know in the comments!

In my opinion, if branches don’t stay open for a long time, squash merge is a good option, also I’m not a fan of rebase because it’s too easy to make huge mistakes. But before deciding which strategy to apply you should take some considerations.

For example, how often do you and your team have to look back at old commits? How many members are on the team? Does your CI need the full commit history?

Think about it, talk with your team, and you can find together the best strategy for your own use case.

Actually, a good strategy could be subscribing to my YouTube channel if you like my content!

Config

If you want to enforce only some merge strategies on GitHub, head over to the settings of your repository and scroll down a little bit.

Here you will find three sections to allow merge commit, squash, or rebase in your pull requests.

If you keep only one selected, all PRs in your repo will be merged with that specific strategy.

For the first two, you can also define the default commit message that can take information from the PR or the commits in the branch in case of a squash.

As you can see rebase doesn’t have this option and the reason is simple. As we just saw, rebasing does not create an extra commit for the merge, so there is nothing to do here. The existing commits are simply moved to the head of your branch.

Since you’re already on this page, if you scroll down a little bit more you might also want to check this flag to automatically delete branches after a PR is merged.

Closing

If you have any preference or you want to share your experience, please leave a comment, I'll be really happy to hear from you!

With that said, happy new year, may it bring you a lot of merged PRs and no merge conflicts!

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Always commit work as soon as possible, even if you're in the middle of something and don't have working product yet. always make separate branches for separate changes, and keep the change in each branch relatively small. Create a MR as soon as your change works and the pipeline (including testing, linting, etc) works. If you follow the above strategies, i think squash commits really are the best option. You don't clutter your history with loads of small "low information" commits, you dont end up seeing a line of code first entered in a commit only to realize it was 5 commits later when the code actually ran succesfully. Instead, you have a clear commit where the new functionality was added, and that commit contains working code and unit tests. In fact, if your tasks are defined small and clear enough, any time you have a working addition to your codebase, that should probably be exactly the moment your task is done and you want to start a MR(excluding unit tests, documentation and linting). So in theory all the commits you 'cut out' are only commits that don't have a working product in them anyway. Of course, if your assumptions dont work, and you have longer lived branches or big MRs with multiple/bigger features, or with multiple people adding multiple different things to one branch, you'll lose a lot of info with squash commit.

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Most of the time, I would recommend using merge commit when merging PRs. This should be the default flow that you use with most PRs. Except when the contributors makes a complete mess of the history, such as they clicked on sync with master/main two dozens times for what should've been half dozen commit change, so that there's more merge commits than there is actual content commits, or they were committing two dozens commit for a one line changes, then I would rebase/squash them, because those are unnecessary complexity that I don't have to deal with. If you're contributing to projects, please don't re-sync the PR branch to master unless there's a merge conflict, or you're asked to do that by the maintainer. Each re-sync creates an unnecessary merge commit, which clutters the history. If you just want to re-run the CI, the maintainer will do that themselves when they're looking at the PR if they think it's necessary. I don't really want to rebase your work, because it strips off any GPG signatures you may have on the commit, and it'll likely screw your local branches as well. But if your git history looks like a completely avoidable dog's breakfast, then I'll have to do that.

docs.github.com › articles › about-pull-request-merges

Pull request merges - GitHub Docs

Rebase and merge on GitHub: Always updates the committer information and creates new commit SHAs, whereas git rebase does not change the committer information when the rebase happens on top of an ancestor commit.

Rietta Inc.

rietta.com › 🏡 home › blog › what's the difference between the 3 github merge methods?

What's the Difference Between the 3 Github Merge Methods?

June 3, 2024 - Github's interface makes merging in commits versatile to suit your style of maintaining a clean Git history. The three different styles are Create Commit, Squash, and Rebase.

docs.github.com › articles › about-merge-methods-on-github

About merge methods on GitHub - GitHub Docs

Pull requests with squashed commits are merged using the fast-forward option. To squash and merge pull requests, you must have write permissions in the repository, and the repository must allow squash merging. You can use squash and merge to create a more streamlined Git history in your repository.

gist.github.com › laanwj › ef8a6dcbb02313442462

Find/show merge commits · GitHub

Find/show merge commits. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

DEV Community

dev.to › zdybit › when-to-use-particular-options-to-close-pull-requests-on-github-3ce8

Merge, squash & rebase on GitHub - pros & cons - DEV Community

March 20, 2023 - The conflict occurred due to lack of relation between those two branches, so git doesn’t know which change precedes. Let's take a look what will happen on GitHub when we raise a pull request for the feature/7 : There are our expected conflict and two commits to merge.

github.blog › home › open source › squash your commits

Squash your commits - The GitHub Blog

July 23, 2024 - For years, the merge button on GitHub has created merge commits (i.e. git merge --no-ff) which retain all of the commits in your branch and interleaves them with commits on the base branch.

Git Tower

git-tower.com › learn › git faq › how to squash commits in git

How to Squash Commits in Git | Learn Version Control with Git

Learn how to squash commits in Git using interactive rebase and merge. Combine multiple commits into one for a cleaner history.

Published 5 days ago

reddit.com › r/git › how do i rebase multiple merge commits into a single one?

r/git on Reddit: How do I rebase multiple merge commits into a single one?

December 13, 2024 - I have this currently How do I rebase the above into this?

Basically "squash" multiple merge commits of different branches into one super branch and one final merge commit with all changes?

While octopus merges exist it is relatively unusual to want to squash multiple merges into a single commit - why do you want to do this? You could do it with git rebase -i -r and then edit the todo list to rebase all the upgrade branches onto 92e0b7a, delete the existing merges and replace them with merge upgrade/@types/eslint upgrade/typescript upgrade/inquirer upgrade/bullmq but I really don't think that makes the history any easier to follow. Do you need separate branches for the upgrades? Can you edit the todo list to have a linear history instead and squash the upgrades together? It looks like the branches each contain a single commit and they are based on top of each other so pick 939553b build: upgrade u/types/eslint to 8.56.9 squash 29216e8 build: upgrade typescript to 5.4.5 squash c439067 build: upgrade inquirer to 9.2.18 squash bd43dac build: upgrade bullmq to 5.7.1 would create a single commit out of them.

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You can create first a local backup of you branch with git checkout mybranch && git checkout -b mybackup. Then you can do an interactive rebase where you can choose what to do with each of your commits: keep them as they are, squash, drop with git checkout mybranch && git rebase mymasterbranch -i

reddit.com › r/git › how can i combine multiple pushed commits to a branch into a single commit?

r/git on Reddit: How can I combine multiple pushed commits to a branch into a single commit?

January 13, 2022 -

I was contributing to my first open source repo, and I opened a pull request solving an issue. I had fixed the issue in like 5 or 6 commits, but then the maintainer of that repo somehow squashed all of them into one commit. How can I do that?

The notification that popped up on GitHub said something like

<maintainer> force-pushed the <issue_branch> from 015b7f3 to fcc9fcd

and he said that he "rebased from the main branch"? What exactly did he do and how can I do that?

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GitHub has a "squash" option when merging a pull request that will collapse the whole branch into a single commit.

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