git rebase for fame and power

While learning git, people kept telling me “Don’t re-base - you’ll never need to re-base and it can screw things up”.

This is terrible advice!

Re-basing is a great tool!

When you hear “Don’t do , you will break things” do that thing now!

and break things!

Re-basing by itself is not dangerous.

As long as you avoid git push origin master --force and only run rm -rf .git every once in a while, you’ll be totally fine.

git rebase

When you type git rebase master, you say:

“I want to re-base my current branch.”

“Even though I started on 20404df, make this branch off of the tip of master instead”

This works for any git object: commits, tags, branches.

Why would I need to use this?

$ git checkout master && git log --pretty="%h -- %s"
ccccccc -- third commit
bbbbbbb -- second commit
aaaaaaa -- first commit

$ git checkout bbbbbbb
# make a new branch, based off of "second commit"
$ git checkout -b my_new_branch
$ touch a_file
$ git add a_file
$ git commit -m 'I just committed a file!'
$ git log --pretty="%h -- %s"
ddddddd -- I just committed a file!
bbbbbbb -- second commit
aaaaaaa -- first commit

# But I meant to make this commit on "third commit", not "second commit"!!!
# OH NOOOOO
# wait, I can re-base?
$ git rebase ccccccc
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: I just committed a file!

$ git log --pretty="%h -- %s"
ddddddd -- I just committed a file!
ccccccc -- third commit
bbbbbbb -- second commit
aaaaaaa -- first commit

# We just changed where the branch was based!

If things go wrong…

This is a chance you screw everything up. Luckily, there are very few things beyond repair in git.

If you do git reflog, you will see something like:

234320a HEAD@{0}: rebase finished: returning to refs/heads/my-new-branch
234320a HEAD@{1}: rebase: added a file
49211d7 HEAD@{2}: rebase: checkout 49211d7
8c90682 HEAD@{3}: checkout: moving from master to my-new-branch

You can then checkout HEAD@{3} to return to a safe state, and then git checkout -b saved-branch to start committing.

As long as you don’t rm -rf .git, you should be able to dig yourself out of any holes :)