learn-rebase

General outline

The goal of this repository is to help you re-create the need to rebase a branch. Then perform an interactive rebase and push your results. The set of steps will generally look like:

1. Create a-branch that adds a.txt with one text line to the repo. Push a-branch to GitHub and open a pull request from a-branch to master
2. Create b-branch that comes out of a-branch. Make and commit an adjustment to a.txt. Then push b-branch to GitHub and open a pull request from b-branch into a-branch.
3. Squash merge a-branch into master. See that on the PR of b-branch, it is now pointing to master AND it has a conflict with master.
4. git pull origin master on master locally
5. git checkout b-branch
6. git rebase -i master (This is THE MAIN SHOW)
7. git push --force-with-lease

Walkthrough

You can clone this repo by running the following command. It will create a learn-rebase folder where you run it. After creating it, cd into it

gh repo clone agam-armis/learn-rebase
cd learn-rebase

Just so that you aren't conflicting with other people learning rebase with this repo, create a directory with your name, and add files inside that directory:

mkdir your_name
cd your_name

Add a.txt with one line of text, commit it to your-name-a-branch and push your-name-a-branch to GitHub:

echo "Hello" > a.txt
git add a.txt
git checkout -b your-name-a-branch
git commit -m "adding a.txt"
git push origin --set-upstream-to origin/your-name-a-branch

Make a change to a.txt, commit it to your-name-b-branch and push your-name-b-branch to GitHub:

git checkout -b your-name-b-branch
echo "Goodbye" >> a.txt
git add a.txt
git commit -m "Concat goodbye to a.txt"
git push --set-upstream-to origin/your-name-b-branch

Let's open our PRs:

• Go to GitHub
• Open a PR for your your-name-a-branch into master
• Open a PR for your your-name-b-branch into your-name-a-branch

Now is the time to cause a conflict between your-name-b-branch and master:

• Squash merge your-name-a-branch
• Check the PR for your-name-b-branch and see that it has a conflict with master

It's rebase time!

Very important to first pull master (or fetch, but that's for a different session). So we'll pull master and checkout your-name-b-branch again:

git checkout master 
cd .. # This is needed as when checking out master you removed the directory with your name, and this will take you back to the main directory
git pull
git checkout your-name-b-branch

And now, for the crucial moment:

git rebase -i master

After running this, you will get somehing like the following in your text editor of choice:

pick 2fd8ac1 adding a.txt
pick 308cc30 Concat goodbye to a.txt

# Rebase bb4765b..308cc30 onto bb4765b (1 command)
#
....

What we want here is to only keep the Concat goodbye to a.txt. To get this result we need to remove the other commit's line and save the file. You should get a success message. Now push the new your-name-b-branch but you should use the --force-with-lease flag as a good practice:

git push --force-with-lease