Squashing Git Commits

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  • git
  • software

Let’s say you have a bunch of commits in your git history and you would like to collapse some of the recent ones into a single commit. You can do this with git rebase; this is affectionately referred to as “squashing” commits. To do so:

  1. Determine either i.) the number of commits that you would like to squash into a single commit or ii.) the commit before the commits that you want to squash.
    • If you want to squash the last N commits to squash: 
       git rebase -i HEAD~N
    • If you have the hash of the commit before the commits to squash: 
       git rebase -i <commit-hash>
  3. In the subsequent file that will open in your default editor, pick the commit(s) that you want to survive the rebase. In this case, we pick only the top commit (denoted pick in the leftmost column), and replace the other commits’ pick’s with an s (for squash). Save and exit the editor.
  4. Rewrite the commit message and delete the old commits.

For a full worked out example, see this post.

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