How to Squash Commits on a Remote Git Branch

Squashing commits is a powerful tool, but like any tool that changes history, it should be used carefully. The main goal is to make the Git history cleaner, easier to understand, and simpler for others. While developing a feature, we make many small, incremental commits. These commits show the process of development but usually don't add value to the final history. Squashing them into one (or a few) well-described commits that represent the completed feature or logical parts makes the history much easier to understand later. So, let's start by making sure our local branch is up-to-date:

git checkout <MY_BRANCH>

Display the log history:

git log --pretty=format:"%h %s" --graph

This is what the outcome will look like:

* 51434fc Update 4
* 7939622 Update 3
* 6be53e7 Update 2
* e8ab8e0 Update 1
* 04d0a65 Initial commit

The first step is to rebase back to a commit before the sequence of commits we want to squash. There are three ways to start a rebase:

• Rebase back N commits to squash the last N commits.

git rebase -i HEAD~4

• Rebase back to a specific commit hash. In this case, we need to use the hash of the commit before the first one we want to squash:

git rebase -i 04d0a65

• Rebase onto the base branch to squash all commits on our feature branch since it diverged from a base branch.

git rebase -i origin/main

All three options above will open a text editor with a list of the commits we specified, the oldest first:

pick e8ab8e0 Update 1
pick 6be53e7 Update 2
pick 7939622 Update 3
pick 51434fc Update 4

To squash commits, keep the first commit we want to retain as pick. Then, change the pick command for the subsequent commits we want to merge into the first one to squash.

pick e8ab8e0 Update 1
squash 6be53e7 Update 2
squash 7939622 Update 3
squash 51434fc Update 4

We can exit the editor at any time by pressing ESC, typing :q!, and then pressing ENTER.

Save and close the editor by pressing ESC, then typing :wq, and pressing ENTER. Git will open another editor instance allowing, us to combine and edit the commit messages for the resulting single commit.

# This is a combination of 4 commits.
# This is the 1st commit message:
Big update

Save and close the editor and check our log history to see the changes:

* 4ce3087 Big update
* 04d0a65 Initial commit

Since we have rewritten the history, a regular git push will be rejected. We need to force the push. Using --force-with-lease is strongly recommended over --force because it checks if the remote branch has changed since we last fetched.

git push --force-with-lease origin <MY_BRANCH>

Thanks, and happy coding.