Luke M

Help, my company uses git rebase

2025-02-27

Once, perhaps in a demonstration of my folly, I accepted a role at an organisation that primarily uses git rebase instead of git merge and pull requests. If your cultcompany has decided to use rebase, they will value a clean commit history over your time and hair folicles.

Git rebase is hard, mostly because it introduces a lot of edge cases and gotchas. It is very easy to overwrite hours or days worth of work, or find your HEAD adrift in the void, with no path out.

But git rebase is great. It can, with some discipline and knowledge, lead to a clean, well-documented git history. Also using git rebase will make you a git wizard.

This is a guide I have written to help developers, such as myself, who find themself in a company who practices such insanitydiscipline.

While I use a mixture of Git cli commands and lazygit, this article will try and assume as little as possible about your setup. For this reason, I'm going to offer general steps.

Survival guide

Split commits

Upon preparing your branch for rebasing onto main, you may realise or be told that you have bundled too many changes in one commit. You want to avoid being in this situation as much as possible, because splitting commits is very difficult. That said, here are the steps you take if you find yourself in this unfortunate circumstance.

The best way to split commits is to undo your git history and move all the changes back into your working tree, so you can try again- this time being more organised.

# uncommit + unstage + delete changes
git reset --hard RECENT_COMMIT
# uncommit + unstage changes -> move changes to working tree
git reset --mixed ORIGIN_COMMIT

Now the working tree should be full of all the changes between ORIGIN_COMMIT and RECENT_COMMIT.

Then you just stage chunks of files that are related, and commit them, piece, by piece.

I personally use lazygit, but most IDEs come with something that allows you to stage chunks of a file.

In LazyGit, it's as easy as:

  1. In the files pane, press space to stage a file, or return to go through its code.
  2. Highlight sections of code using v, and stage them using space.
  3. When ready, hit escape and c to commit.

Personally, I prefer to duck out of lazygit for my commit and use git commit -v, because this brings up my pre-commit message. I keep guidelines on how to write a good commit in this.