Introduction

Rebasing in Git is a powerful technique that allows you to integrate changes from one branch into another by moving or combining a sequence of commits. This tutorial covers the fundamentals of rebasing, including its advantages, how to perform a rebase, and best practices.

1. Understanding Rebasing

Unlike merging, rebasing rewrites the commit history by creating new commits for each commit in the original branch. This can result in a cleaner, linear project history without the need for merge commits.

2. Basic Rebasing

To rebase the current branch onto another branch:

        
            git rebase <branch_name>
        
    

3. Interactive Rebasing

Interactive rebasing allows you to edit, remove, or combine commits interactively using a text editor:

        
            git rebase -i HEAD~3
        
    

4. Resolving Conflicts during Rebasing

Conflicts may occur during a rebase, similar to merging. Here’s how to handle them:

• Resolve conflicts manually in the affected files.
• After resolving conflicts, use git add to mark them as resolved.
• Continue the rebase process with:

          
              git rebase --continue
          
      

• If you need to skip a patch that causes a conflict, you can use:

          
              git rebase --skip
          
      

5. Aborting a Rebase

If you encounter problems during the rebase and decide it's not the right approach, you can abort and return to the original branch state with:

        
            git rebase --abort
        
    

6. Best Practices for Rebasing

Rebasing is a powerful tool but needs to be used with caution to avoid potential pitfalls:

• Do not rebase commits that exist outside your repository and that others might have based work on.
• Rebase often on local branches to keep them up-to-date with the base branch.
• Always ensure your working directory is clean before starting a rebase.

7. Conclusion

Mastering Git rebasing can streamline your project history and simplify the process of integrating changes. By following the practices outlined in this tutorial, you can effectively utilize rebasing to maintain a clean commit history.