Play video

This article is meant to serve as a supplement and reference to the video linked above, so if you haven’t seen that yet, I encourage you to watch it first.

The basics

Out of the gate, the goal of both merging and rebasing is to take commits from a feature branch and put them onto another branch. Let’s start with how a quote-on-quote “normal” merge makes that happen.

Merging

Say I have a graph that looks like this. As you can see, I split off my feature branch at commit 2, and have done a bit of work.

If I run a merge, git will stuff all of my changes from my feature branch into one large merge commit that contains ALL of my feature branch changes. It will then place this special merge commit onto master. When this happens, the tree will show your feature branch, as well as the master branch. Going further, if you imagine working on a team with other developers, your git tree can become complex: displaying everybody else’s branches and merges.

Rebasing

Now let’s take a look at how rebase would handle this same situation. Instead of doing a git merge, I’ll do a git rebase. What rebase will do is take all of the commits on your feature branch and move them on top of the master commits. Behind the scenes, git is actually blowing away the feature branch commits and duplicating them as new commits on top of the master branch (remember, under the hood, commit objects are immutable and immovable). What you get with this approach is a nice clean tree with all your commits laid out nicely in a row, like a timeline. Easy to trace.

Rebasing caveats

At this point, I think I better mention some caveats. Rebase doesn’t play super well with open-source projects and pull requests since it can be hard to trace, especially small changes that are introduced to a codebase. This point is a bit nuanced, but here is an article that does a good job of explaining why.

It can also be dangerous if you’re working on a shared branch with other developers because of how Git rewrites commits when rebasing; however, in the workflow example below, I’ll show you how to mitigate this risk.

In practice: the actual commands

On the development team I work with, we’ve successfully adopted the workflow I’m about to show you and it works well for us. If you’d like a visual representation of what each of these commands does, check out my video.

When I start development I always make sure the code on my local machine is synced to the latest commit from remote master

# With my local master branch checked out
git pull

Next, I’ll check out a new branch so I can write and commit code to this branch – keeping my work separated from the master branch

git checkout -b my_cool_feature

As I’m developing my feature, I’ll make a few commits…

git add .
git commit -m 'This is a new commit, yay!'

Note: while I’m developing it’s likely that my fellow developers will have shipped some of their own changes to remote master. That’s ok, we can deal with that later.

Now that I’m done developing my feature, I want to merge my changes back into remote master. To begin this process I’ll switch back to local master branch and pull the latest changes. This ensures my local machine has any new commits submitted by my teammates.

git checkout master
git pull

What I want to do now is make sure my feature will jive with any new changes from remote master. To do this, I’ll checkout my feature branch and rebase against my local master. This will re-anchor my branch against the latest changes I just pulled from remote master. Additionally at this point, Git will let me know if I have any conflicts and I can take care of them on my branch

git checkout my_cool_feature
git rebase master

Now that my feature branch doesn’t have any conflicts, I can switch back to my master branch and place my changes onto master.

git checkout master
git rebase my_cool_feature

Since I synced with remote master before doing the rebase, I should be able to push my changes up to remote master without issues.

git push

More reading

I certainly didn’t try to dive very deeply into the inner working of rebase (or merge) in this short article so if you’re curious and want to go further, check out these articles: