If you have ever worked in a software development team, you must have faced a situation where a bug
fix is present in the main branch and you require it in your feature branch to progress.
A trivial way to solve this problem is to merge the main branch into your feature branch. But,
this leads to a dirty commit history in your feature branch. Your feature branch will consist of few
(or many) commits that are unrelated to your task.
What if?
What if you could create a new branch of the HEAD of the main branch and migrate all your
feature branch commits into the new branch?
This would give you two-pronged benefits:
- You will have the bug fix in your “new” feature branch
- You will have a clean commit history in your feature branch.
Using git-rebase
You can use the following command to get this desired result:
git rebase <branch-to-rebase-to>
Mostly, you’ll be using git rebase main, which means that your feature branch’s history will be
rewritten such that the base of your feature branch will be altered to the HEAD of the main
branch.
The green commits form after the rebase
Caveat
Since this command rewrites history, you may have to use the --force flag when pushing your
changes in the feature branch to the remote repository.