Git squash all commits in branch without conflicting

Question

A common development workflow for us is to checkout branch b, commit a bunch to it, then squash all those commits into one (still on b).

However, during the rebase -i process to squash all the commits, there are frequently conflicts at multiple steps.

I essentially want to alter the branch into one commit that represents the state of the repository at the time of the final commit on b

I've done some searching but I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for. I don't want to merge --squash because we would like to test the squashed feature branch before merging.

Answer 1

If you don't need the commit information, then you could just do a soft reset. Then files remain as they were and when you commit, this commit will be on top of the commit you did reset to.

To find the commit to reset to:

git merge-base HEAD BRANCH_YOU_BRANCHED_FROM

Then

git reset --soft COMMIT_HASH

Then re-craft the commit, perhaps:

git commit -am 'This is the new re-created one commit'

Answer 2

This is simlar to the answer from Rasmus but broken down into three steps that should always work:

$ git merge feature1
$ git reset --soft HEAD@{1}
$ git commit -c feature1

Explanation:

1. merge and resolve conflicts
2. keep changes staged but reset to old head
3. commit all changes using commit message and author from feature branch latest commit

Answer 3

I've created a tool specifically for this task:

https://github.com/sheerun/git-squash

For example you can call following to squash all commits from "master" commit up to HEAD, no matter how many conflicts there would be along the way:

git squash master

It's basically what GitHub does when you "squash and merge" pull request.