Vim & Vision

[ #168 ] Git Squashing Permalink

Git Added less than a year ago and last edited about a fortnight ago

If you decide to choose a development workflow where you are working on lots of branches (perhaps a branch per feature), then you will want to merge branches back to master regularly - like when you've finished your feature. If you have branches for smallish items then you might only want the whole feature to appear under one commit in your master branch - even though your feature branch has many commits.

This is when you should use git's commit squash.

$ git branch
* master
$ git checkout -b feature-01
$ # EDIT A FILE
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Edit 01"
$ # EDIT ANOTHER FILE
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Edit 02"
$ git log
 ... output here lists Edit 01, Edit 02 and all previous log messages ...
$ git checkout master
$ git merge --squash feature-01
$ git commit -m "Feature 01"
$ git log
... output here lists Feature 01 and all previous log messages ...

So Edit 01 and Edit 02 now appear in your log the one Feature 01 commit.

If you don't use squash then all the commits from your branch will also individually appear in the commit log for master.

A squash acts like a regular merge in svn.