GIT-REBASE(1)                                                    GIT-REBASE(1)



NAME
       git-rebase - Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head

SYNOPSIS
       git rebase [-i | --interactive] [options] [--onto <newbase>]
               [<upstream>] [<branch>]
       git rebase [-i | --interactive] [options] --onto <newbase>
               --root [<branch>]





       git rebase --continue | --skip | --abort


DESCRIPTION
       If <branch> is specified, git rebase will perform an automatic git
       checkout <branch> before doing anything else. Otherwise it remains on
       the current branch.


       If <upstream> is not specified, the upstream configured in
       branch.<name>.remote and branch.<name>.merge options will be used; see
       git-config(1) for details. If you are currently not on any branch or if
       the current branch does not have a configured upstream, the rebase will
       abort.


       All changes made by commits in the current branch but that are not in
       <upstream> are saved to a temporary area. This is the same set of
       commits that would be shown by git log <upstream>..HEAD (or git log
       HEAD, if --root is specified).


       The current branch is reset to <upstream>, or <newbase> if the --onto
       option was supplied. This has the exact same effect as git reset --hard
       <upstream> (or <newbase>). ORIG_HEAD is set to point at the tip of the
       branch before the reset.


       The commits that were previously saved into the temporary area are then
       reapplied to the current branch, one by one, in order. Note that any
       commits in HEAD which introduce the same textual changes as a commit in
       HEAD..<upstream> are omitted (i.e., a patch already accepted upstream
       with a different commit message or timestamp will be skipped).


       It is possible that a merge failure will prevent this process from
       being completely automatic. You will have to resolve any such merge
       failure and run git rebase --continue. Another option is to bypass the
       commit that caused the merge failure with git rebase --skip. To restore
       the original <branch> and remove the .git/rebase-apply working files,
       use the command git rebase --abort instead.


       Assume the following history exists and the current branch is "topic":

                 A---B---C topic
                /
           D---E---F---G master





       From this point, the result of either of the following commands:

       git rebase master
       git rebase master topic


       would be:

                         A'--B'--C' topic
                        /
           D---E---F---G master





       NOTE: The latter form is just a short-hand of git checkout topic
       followed by git rebase master. When rebase exits topic will remain the
       checked-out branch.


       If the upstream branch already contains a change you have made (e.g.,
       because you mailed a patch which was applied upstream), then that
       commit will be skipped. For example, running &#8216;git rebase master`
       on the following history (in which A&#8217; and A introduce the same
       set of changes, but have different committer information):

                 A---B---C topic
                /
           D---E---A'---F master





       will result in:

                          B'---C' topic
                         /
           D---E---A'---F master





       Here is how you would transplant a topic branch based on one branch to
       another, to pretend that you forked the topic branch from the latter
       branch, using rebase --onto.


       First let&#8217;s assume your topic is based on branch next. For
       example, a feature developed in topic depends on some functionality
       which is found in next.

           o---o---o---o---o  master
                \
                 o---o---o---o---o  next
                                  \
                                   o---o---o  topic





       We want to make topic forked from branch master; for example, because
       the functionality on which topic depends was merged into the more
       stable master branch. We want our tree to look like this:

           o---o---o---o---o  master
               |            \
               |             o'--o'--o'  topic
                \
                 o---o---o---o---o  next





       We can get this using the following command:

       git rebase --onto master next topic


       Another example of --onto option is to rebase part of a branch. If we
       have the following situation:

                                   H---I---J topicB
                                  /
                         E---F---G  topicA
                        /
           A---B---C---D  master





       then the command

       git rebase --onto master topicA topicB


       would result in:

                        H'--I'--J'  topicB
                       /
                       | E---F---G  topicA
                       |/
           A---B---C---D  master





       This is useful when topicB does not depend on topicA.


       A range of commits could also be removed with rebase. If we have the
       following situation:

           E---F---G---H---I---J  topicA





       then the command

       git rebase --onto topicA~5 topicA~3 topicA


       would result in the removal of commits F and G:

           E---H'---I'---J'  topicA





       This is useful if F and G were flawed in some way, or should not be
       part of topicA. Note that the argument to --onto and the <upstream>
       parameter can be any valid commit-ish.


       In case of conflict, git rebase will stop at the first problematic
       commit and leave conflict markers in the tree. You can use git diff to
       locate the markers (<<<<<<) and make edits to resolve the conflict. For
       each file you edit, you need to tell git that the conflict has been
       resolved, typically this would be done with

       git add <filename>


       After resolving the conflict manually and updating the index with the
       desired resolution, you can continue the rebasing process with

       git rebase --continue


       Alternatively, you can undo the git rebase with

       git rebase --abort


CONFIGURATION
       rebase.stat
              Whether to show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the
              last rebase. False by default.


       rebase.autosquash
              If set to true enable --autosquash option by default.


OPTIONS
       <newbase>
              Starting point at which to create the new commits. If the --onto
              option is not specified, the starting point is <upstream>. May
              be any valid commit, and not just an existing branch name.

              As a special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for the
              merge base of A and B if there is exactly one merge base. You
              can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults
              to HEAD.


       <upstream>
              Upstream branch to compare against. May be any valid commit, not
              just an existing branch name. Defaults to the configured
              upstream for the current branch.


       <branch>
              Working branch; defaults to HEAD.


       --continue
              Restart the rebasing process after having resolved a merge
              conflict.


       --abort
              Restore the original branch and abort the rebase operation.


       --skip Restart the rebasing process by skipping the current patch.


       -m, --merge
              Use merging strategies to rebase. When the recursive (default)
              merge strategy is used, this allows rebase to be aware of
              renames on the upstream side.

              Note that a rebase merge works by replaying each commit from the
              working branch on top of the <upstream> branch. Because of this,
              when a merge conflict happens, the side reported as ours is the
              so-far rebased series, starting with <upstream>, and theirs is
              the working branch. In other words, the sides are swapped.


       -s <strategy>, --strategy=<strategy>
              Use the given merge strategy. If there is no -s option git
              merge-recursive is used instead. This implies --merge.

              Because git rebase replays each commit from the working branch
              on top of the <upstream> branch using the given strategy, using
              the ours strategy simply discards all patches from the <branch>,
              which makes little sense.


       -X <strategy-option>, --strategy-option=<strategy-option>
              Pass the <strategy-option> through to the merge strategy. This
              implies --merge and, if no strategy has been specified, -s
              recursive. Note the reversal of ours and theirs as noted in
              above for the -m option.


       -q, --quiet
              Be quiet. Implies --no-stat.


       -v, --verbose
              Be verbose. Implies --stat.


       --stat Show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase.
              The diffstat is also controlled by the configuration option
              rebase.stat.


       -n, --no-stat
              Do not show a diffstat as part of the rebase process.


       --no-verify
              This option bypasses the pre-rebase hook. See also githooks(5).


       --verify
              Allows the pre-rebase hook to run, which is the default. This
              option can be used to override --no-verify. See also
              githooks(5).


       -C<n>  Ensure at least <n> lines of surrounding context match before
              and after each change. When fewer lines of surrounding context
              exist they all must match. By default no context is ever
              ignored.


       -f, --force-rebase
              Force the rebase even if the current branch is a descendant of
              the commit you are rebasing onto. Normally non-interactive
              rebase will exit with the message "Current branch is up to date"
              in such a situation. Incompatible with the --interactive option.

              You may find this (or --no-ff with an interactive rebase)
              helpful after reverting a topic branch merge, as this option
              recreates the topic branch with fresh commits so it can be
              remerged successfully without needing to "revert the reversion"
              (see the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To: howto/revert-a-faulty-
              merge.txt for details).


       --ignore-whitespace, --whitespace=<option>
              These flag are passed to the git apply program (see
              git-apply(1)) that applies the patch. Incompatible with the
              --interactive option.


       --committer-date-is-author-date, --ignore-date
              These flags are passed to git am to easily change the dates of
              the rebased commits (see git-am(1)). Incompatible with the
              --interactive option.


       -i, --interactive
              Make a list of the commits which are about to be rebased. Let
              the user edit that list before rebasing. This mode can also be
              used to split commits (see SPLITTING COMMITS below).


       -p, --preserve-merges
              Instead of ignoring merges, try to recreate them.

              This uses the --interactive machinery internally, but combining
              it with the --interactive option explicitly is generally not a
              good idea unless you know what you are doing (see BUGS below).


       --root Rebase all commits reachable from <branch>, instead of limiting
              them with an <upstream>. This allows you to rebase the root
              commit(s) on a branch. Must be used with --onto, and will skip
              changes already contained in <newbase> (instead of <upstream>).
              When used together with --preserve-merges, all root commits will
              be rewritten to have <newbase> as parent instead.


       --autosquash, --no-autosquash
              When the commit log message begins with "squash! ..." (or
              "fixup! ..."), and there is a commit whose title begins with the
              same ..., automatically modify the todo list of rebase -i so
              that the commit marked for squashing comes right after the
              commit to be modified, and change the action of the moved commit
              from pick to squash (or fixup).

              This option is only valid when the --interactive option is used.

              If the --autosquash option is enabled by default using the
              configuration variable rebase.autosquash, this option can be
              used to override and disable this setting.


       --no-ff
              With --interactive, cherry-pick all rebased commits instead of
              fast-forwarding over the unchanged ones. This ensures that the
              entire history of the rebased branch is composed of new commits.

              Without --interactive, this is a synonym for --force-rebase.

              You may find this helpful after reverting a topic branch merge,
              as this option recreates the topic branch with fresh commits so
              it can be remerged successfully without needing to "revert the
              reversion" (see the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To: howto/revert-
              a-faulty-merge.txt for details).


MERGE STRATEGIES
       The merge mechanism (git-merge and git-pull commands) allows the
       backend merge strategies to be chosen with -s option. Some strategies
       can also take their own options, which can be passed by giving
       -X<option> arguments to git-merge and/or git-pull.


       resolve
              This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch and
              another branch you pulled from) using a 3-way merge algorithm.
              It tries to carefully detect criss-cross merge ambiguities and
              is considered generally safe and fast.


       recursive
              This can only resolve two heads using a 3-way merge algorithm.
              When there is more than one common ancestor that can be used for
              3-way merge, it creates a merged tree of the common ancestors
              and uses that as the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This
              has been reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without
              causing mis-merges by tests done on actual merge commits taken
              from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. Additionally this can
              detect and handle merges involving renames. This is the default
              merge strategy when pulling or merging one branch.

              The recursive strategy can take the following options:



              ours   This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved
                     cleanly by favoring our version. Changes from the other
                     tree that do not conflict with our side are reflected to
                     the merge result.

                     This should not be confused with the ours merge strategy,
                     which does not even look at what the other tree contains
                     at all. It discards everything the other tree did,
                     declaring our history contains all that happened in it.


              theirs This is opposite of ours.


              patience
                     With this option, merge-recursive spends a little extra
                     time to avoid mismerges that sometimes occur due to
                     unimportant matching lines (e.g., braces from distinct
                     functions). Use this when the branches to be merged have
                     diverged wildly. See also git-diff(1)  --patience.


              ignore-space-change, ignore-all-space, ignore-space-at-eol
                     Treats lines with the indicated type of whitespace change
                     as unchanged for the sake of a three-way merge.
                     Whitespace changes mixed with other changes to a line are
                     not ignored. See also git-diff(1)  -b, -w, and
                     --ignore-space-at-eol.


                     o  If their version only introduces whitespace changes to
                        a line, our version is used;

                     o  If our version introduces whitespace changes but their
                        version includes a substantial change, their version
                        is used;

                     o  Otherwise, the merge proceeds in the usual way.

              renormalize
                     This runs a virtual check-out and check-in of all three
                     stages of a file when resolving a three-way merge. This
                     option is meant to be used when merging branches with
                     different clean filters or end-of-line normalization
                     rules. See "Merging branches with differing
                     checkin/checkout attributes" in gitattributes(5) for
                     details.


              no-renormalize
                     Disables the renormalize option. This overrides the
                     merge.renormalize configuration variable.


              rename-threshold=<n>
                     Controls the similarity threshold used for rename
                     detection. See also git-diff(1)  -M.


              subtree[=<path>]
                     This option is a more advanced form of subtree strategy,
                     where the strategy makes a guess on how two trees must be
                     shifted to match with each other when merging. Instead,
                     the specified path is prefixed (or stripped from the
                     beginning) to make the shape of two trees to match.


       octopus
              This resolves cases with more than two heads, but refuses to do
              a complex merge that needs manual resolution. It is primarily
              meant to be used for bundling topic branch heads together. This
              is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging more than
              one branch.


       ours   This resolves any number of heads, but the resulting tree of the
              merge is always that of the current branch head, effectively
              ignoring all changes from all other branches. It is meant to be
              used to supersede old development history of side branches. Note
              that this is different from the -Xours option to the recursive
              merge strategy.


       subtree
              This is a modified recursive strategy. When merging trees A and
              B, if B corresponds to a subtree of A, B is first adjusted to
              match the tree structure of A, instead of reading the trees at
              the same level. This adjustment is also done to the common
              ancestor tree.


NOTES
       You should understand the implications of using git rebase on a
       repository that you share. See also RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE
       below.


       When the git-rebase command is run, it will first execute a
       "pre-rebase" hook if one exists. You can use this hook to do sanity
       checks and reject the rebase if it isn&#8217;t appropriate. Please see
       the template pre-rebase hook script for an example.


       Upon completion, <branch> will be the current branch.


INTERACTIVE MODE
       Rebasing interactively means that you have a chance to edit the commits
       which are rebased. You can reorder the commits, and you can remove them
       (weeding out bad or otherwise unwanted patches).


       The interactive mode is meant for this type of workflow:


       1. have a wonderful idea

       2. hack on the code

       3. prepare a series for submission

       4. submit

       where point 2. consists of several instances of


       1. regular use


          1. finish something worthy of a commit

          2. commit

       2. independent fixup


          1. realize that something does not work

          2. fix that

          3. commit it

       Sometimes the thing fixed in b.2. cannot be amended to the not-quite
       perfect commit it fixes, because that commit is buried deeply in a
       patch series. That is exactly what interactive rebase is for: use it
       after plenty of "a"s and "b"s, by rearranging and editing commits, and
       squashing multiple commits into one.


       Start it with the last commit you want to retain as-is:

       git rebase -i <after-this-commit>


       An editor will be fired up with all the commits in your current branch
       (ignoring merge commits), which come after the given commit. You can
       reorder the commits in this list to your heart&#8217;s content, and you
       can remove them. The list looks more or less like this:

       pick deadbee The oneline of this commit
       pick fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
       ...





       The oneline descriptions are purely for your pleasure; git rebase will
       not look at them but at the commit names ("deadbee" and "fa1afe1" in
       this example), so do not delete or edit the names.


       By replacing the command "pick" with the command "edit", you can tell
       git rebase to stop after applying that commit, so that you can edit the
       files and/or the commit message, amend the commit, and continue
       rebasing.


       If you just want to edit the commit message for a commit, replace the
       command "pick" with the command "reword".


       If you want to fold two or more commits into one, replace the command
       "pick" for the second and subsequent commits with "squash" or "fixup".
       If the commits had different authors, the folded commit will be
       attributed to the author of the first commit. The suggested commit
       message for the folded commit is the concatenation of the commit
       messages of the first commit and of those with the "squash" command,
       but omits the commit messages of commits with the "fixup" command.


       git rebase will stop when "pick" has been replaced with "edit" or when
       a command fails due to merge errors. When you are done editing and/or
       resolving conflicts you can continue with git rebase --continue.


       For example, if you want to reorder the last 5 commits, such that what
       was HEAD~4 becomes the new HEAD. To achieve that, you would call git
       rebase like this:

       $ git rebase -i HEAD~5





       And move the first patch to the end of the list.


       You might want to preserve merges, if you have a history like this:

                  X
                   \
                A---M---B
               /
       ---o---O---P---Q





       Suppose you want to rebase the side branch starting at "A" to "Q". Make
       sure that the current HEAD is "B", and call

       $ git rebase -i -p --onto Q O





       Reordering and editing commits usually creates untested intermediate
       steps. You may want to check that your history editing did not break
       anything by running a test, or at least recompiling at intermediate
       points in history by using the "exec" command (shortcut "x"). You may
       do so by creating a todo list like this one:

       pick deadbee Implement feature XXX
       fixup f1a5c00 Fix to feature XXX
       exec make
       pick c0ffeee The oneline of the next commit
       edit deadbab The oneline of the commit after
       exec cd subdir; make test
       ...





       The interactive rebase will stop when a command fails (i.e. exits with
       non-0 status) to give you an opportunity to fix the problem. You can
       continue with git rebase --continue.


       The "exec" command launches the command in a shell (the one specified
       in $SHELL, or the default shell if $SHELL is not set), so you can use
       shell features (like "cd", ">", ";" ...). The command is run from the
       root of the working tree.


SPLITTING COMMITS
       In interactive mode, you can mark commits with the action "edit".
       However, this does not necessarily mean that git rebase expects the
       result of this edit to be exactly one commit. Indeed, you can undo the
       commit, or you can add other commits. This can be used to split a
       commit into two:


       o  Start an interactive rebase with git rebase -i <commit>^, where
          <commit> is the commit you want to split. In fact, any commit range
          will do, as long as it contains that commit.

       o  Mark the commit you want to split with the action "edit".

       o  When it comes to editing that commit, execute git reset HEAD^. The
          effect is that the HEAD is rewound by one, and the index follows
          suit. However, the working tree stays the same.

       o  Now add the changes to the index that you want to have in the first
          commit. You can use git add (possibly interactively) or git gui (or
          both) to do that.

       o  Commit the now-current index with whatever commit message is
          appropriate now.

       o  Repeat the last two steps until your working tree is clean.

       o  Continue the rebase with git rebase --continue.

       If you are not absolutely sure that the intermediate revisions are
       consistent (they compile, pass the testsuite, etc.) you should use git
       stash to stash away the not-yet-committed changes after each commit,
       test, and amend the commit if fixes are necessary.


RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE
       Rebasing (or any other form of rewriting) a branch that others have
       based work on is a bad idea: anyone downstream of it is forced to
       manually fix their history. This section explains how to do the fix
       from the downstream&#8217;s point of view. The real fix, however, would
       be to avoid rebasing the upstream in the first place.


       To illustrate, suppose you are in a situation where someone develops a
       subsystem branch, and you are working on a topic that is dependent on
       this subsystem. You might end up with a history like the following:

           o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                \
                 o---o---o---o---o  subsystem
                                  \
                                   *---*---*  topic





       If subsystem is rebased against master, the following happens:

           o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                \                       \
                 o---o---o---o---o       o'--o'--o'--o'--o'  subsystem
                                  \
                                   *---*---*  topic





       If you now continue development as usual, and eventually merge topic to
       subsystem, the commits from subsystem will remain duplicated forever:

           o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                \                       \
                 o---o---o---o---o       o'--o'--o'--o'--o'--M  subsystem
                                  \                         /
                                   *---*---*-..........-*--*  topic





       Such duplicates are generally frowned upon because they clutter up
       history, making it harder to follow. To clean things up, you need to
       transplant the commits on topic to the new subsystem tip, i.e., rebase
       topic. This becomes a ripple effect: anyone downstream from topic is
       forced to rebase too, and so on!


       There are two kinds of fixes, discussed in the following subsections:


       Easy case: The changes are literally the same.
              This happens if the subsystem rebase was a simple rebase and had
              no conflicts.


       Hard case: The changes are not the same.
              This happens if the subsystem rebase had conflicts, or used
              --interactive to omit, edit, squash, or fixup commits; or if the
              upstream used one of commit --amend, reset, or filter-branch.


   The easy case
       Only works if the changes (patch IDs based on the diff contents) on
       subsystem are literally the same before and after the rebase subsystem
       did.


       In that case, the fix is easy because git rebase knows to skip changes
       that are already present in the new upstream. So if you say (assuming
       you&#8217;re on topic)

           $ git rebase subsystem





       you will end up with the fixed history

           o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                                        \
                                         o'--o'--o'--o'--o'  subsystem
                                                          \
                                                           *---*---*  topic





   The hard case
       Things get more complicated if the subsystem changes do not exactly
       correspond to the ones before the rebase.


              Note

              While an "easy case recovery" sometimes appears to be successful
              even in the hard case, it may have unintended consequences. For
              example, a commit that was removed via git rebase --interactive
              will be resurrected!



       The idea is to manually tell git rebase "where the old subsystem ended
       and your topic began", that is, what the old merge-base between them
       was. You will have to find a way to name the last commit of the old
       subsystem, for example:


       o  With the subsystem reflog: after git fetch, the old tip of subsystem
          is at subsystem@{1}. Subsequent fetches will increase the number.
          (See git-reflog(1).)

       o  Relative to the tip of topic: knowing that your topic has three
          commits, the old tip of subsystem must be topic~3.

       You can then transplant the old subsystem..topic to the new tip by
       saying (for the reflog case, and assuming you are on topic already):

           $ git rebase --onto subsystem subsystem@{1}





       The ripple effect of a "hard case" recovery is especially bad: everyone
       downstream from topic will now have to perform a "hard case" recovery
       too!


BUGS
       The todo list presented by --preserve-merges --interactive does not
       represent the topology of the revision graph. Editing commits and
       rewording their commit messages should work fine, but attempts to
       reorder commits tend to produce counterintuitive results.


       For example, an attempt to rearrange

       1 --- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5





       to

       1 --- 2 --- 4 --- 3 --- 5





       by moving the "pick 4" line will result in the following history:

               3
              /
       1 --- 2 --- 4 --- 5





GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite




                                                                 GIT-REBASE(1)
