How to Flatten git Commits
One of my least favorite tasks as a software engineer is resolving merge conflicts. A simple rebase is a frequent occurrence but the rare massive conflict is inevitable when many engineers work in a single codebase. One thing that helps me deal with large rebases with many merge conflicts is flattening a branch's commits before fixing merge conflicts. Let's have a look at how to flatten those commits before resolving those conflicts!
My typical command for rebasing off of the main branch is:
# While on the feature branch...
git rebase -i master
To flatten commits before the rebase, which can make resolving merge conflicts easier, you can slightly modify the original command:
# While on the feature branch...
# git rebase -i HEAD~[NUMBER_OF_COMMITS]
git rebase -i HEAD~10
The example above would flatten the last 10 commits on the branch. With just one single commit, you avoid the stop-start nature of fixing merge conflicts with multiple commits!
![Serving Fonts from CDN]()
For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain). Along with those assets are custom web fonts. Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...
![5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." Can you blame us though? We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...
![Color Palette Generator Using jQuery]()
As I continue to learn jQuery, I think it's important that I begin by porting over scripts I've created using MooTools. One of those scripts is my Color Palette Generator script, which debuted on Eric Wendelin's blog. For those of you that...
![Create a 3D Animating Sidebar]()
Mozilla's Christian Heilmann is an evangelist that knows how to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. You'll often see him creating sweet demos on his blog or the awesome Mozilla Hacks blog. One of my favorite pieces...
Some of the code in my previous comment got stripped out. The command I use to merge a branch into master while flattening it to a single commit is:
Seems there are always multiple ways to do things, especially in Git.
Also it’s possible to select all commits that belongs to this branch after creation from the parent branch and don’t select count of them by hands with the following:
It’s useful if you want to do that prior to merge