Maintaining a clean git history brings me a lot of joy. That's because sometimes it's extremely difficult to make happen all the time when I'm constantly going back, seeing a small mistake, and need to make a teeny edit.
Say I make a commit to update a component, and it's all good. Then I realize I left a debugging console.log() in, failing to make the perfect commit.
Enter git commit --fixup and git rebase -i --autosquash. Used together, they make a worthy pair in helping me clean up my git history. The original post is here.
Note: although this is cleaning the git log, it is rewriting history, so use with caution, especially when collaborating with others. Conflicts may occur.
Here is my example:
$ git log --oneline
cd3fb6 Update component
ba83fe Previous commit
Now I make my change, that is, deleting the sray console.log() from my code.
Then I create the commit:
git commit --fixup cd3fb6
See how I pass in the commit hash for the commit I want to combine this with? I want the console.log() removal together with the Update component commit. To me, there is no point in having it as a separate commit.
Now there is a new commit after I check the git log.
d294ae !fixup Update component
cd3fb6 Update component
ba83fe Previous commit
The latest commit has the prefix !fixup, which will be read in by the next git command, git rebase.
Using the --autosquash argument, the rebase will go through, find the prefix !fixup and assign it with the fixup type automatically.
So here we go, passing in the commit hash for the change prior to the commit I want combined (the one for Previous commit).
git rebase -i --autosquash ba83fe
Using -i is the interactive mode, so I can see exactly what is going on before going through with the rebase.
When it's all good, I save and quit, and then check the log:
9282ca Update component
ba83fe Previous commit
Now the commits are combined into one, with a new hash!
Git documentation: