Combining Commits (Squashing)

The squash is an interactive rebase operation that allows you to combine multiple commits into a single one. This is useful for cleaning up the commit history to make it more readable and coherent, especially before merging a branch into the main one.

When to Use Squash?

• To group small changes: If you've made multiple commits with minor changes, you can combine them into a single commit.
• When you've made mistakes: You can combine a commit that fixes errors with the original commit where the error was introduced.
• To improve readability: A cleaner commit history is easier to read and understand for other developers.

How to Squash Commits

Suppose you have the following commit history:

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And you want to combine the last two commits (Add new feature and Fix typo) into a single one. To do this, start an interactive rebase over the last four commits:

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In the interactive rebase file, change the pick command of Fix typo to squash (or s):

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Merging Commit Messages

After saving and exiting the editor, Git will ask you to combine the commit messages. Open a new editor where you can edit the merged commit message. The content will look something like this:

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You can edit this message to create a more coherent commit message. For example:

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Save and close the editor to complete the squash.

Verification

To confirm that the commits have been combined correctly, you can check the commit history:

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You should see that the two commits have now been merged into one:

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Visual Resources