Git should i rebase

Large refactors and major feature additions are good candidates for separate feature branches that can later be merged into master. As an added bonus, when merges are reserved for these major changes, the merge commits act as milestones that others can use to figure out when these major changes were incorporated into the project.

But before we continue working on our feature branch, we decide we want to bring in the latest changes from master to keep things fresh. At a lower level, what rebase actually does is pluck commits from a branch one by one chronologically and re-attach them to a different commit. The point at which the branch…branched has now changed.

You might see from the diagrams above why we would choose to rebase instead of merge in this situation. Unlike with merging, rebase does not create an extra commit. This is ideal for our situation, since all we are currently trying to do is keep our feature branch up-to-date with any new commits from master. You might wonder if there are implications to this you should worry about. If you and your team are not familiar with, or don't understand the intricacies of rebase , then you probably shouldn't use it.

In this context, always merge is the safest option. If you and your team are familiar with both options, then the main decision revolves around this: Do you value more a clean, linear history? Or the traceability of your branches? In the first case go for a rebase policy, in the later go for a merge one.

The policy inside Atlassian's Bitbucket team is always to merge feature branches, and require that branches are merged through a pull request for quality and code review. But the team is not too strict around fast-forward. This article is the result of the confluence of insightful exchanges pun intended!

This piece hopefully dispels the doubts on this, and allows you to adopt an approach that works for your team. Follow me durdn , and the fantastic AtlDevtools team for more git awesomeness. Learn about code review in Bitbucket Cloud Create a repository Clone and make a change on a new branch If you're using command line If you're using Sourcetree Create a pull request to merge your change.

Learn branching in Bitbucket Cloud Get set up Review branching workflow. Learn undoing changes with Bitbucket Cloud git status git log git reset git revert. Beginner What is version control Benefits of version control. Source Code Management. Why Git for your Organization Git for developers Git for marketing Git for product management Git for designers Git for customer support Git for human resources Git for anyone managing a budget.

Git SSH. Git archive. Git Cheatsheet. Getting Started Setting up a repository git init git clone git config git alias. Saving changes git add git commit git diff git stash. Inspecting a repository git status git tag git blame. Undoing changes git checkout git clean git revert git reset git rm. Rewriting history git commit --amend git rebase git rebase -i git reflog.

Collaborating Syncing git remote git fetch git push git pull. Using branches git branch git checkout git merge Merge conflicts Merge strategies. Migrate to Git from SVN. Perforce to Git - why to make the move. Joe: mentally, you are saying "replay any of my changes done in isolation in my private branch on top of that other branch, but leave me in my private branch once the rebase is done". That is a good opportunity to clean-up the local history, avoiding "checkpoint commits", broken bisect and incorrect blame results.

See "Git workflow": sandofsky. If one of your commit introduces a conflict, you will see it right away. A merge introduce only one merged commit, which might trigger many conflict without an easy way to see which one, amongst your own local commits, did add said conflict. So in addition to a cleaner history, you get a more precise view of the changes you introduce, commit by commit replayed by the rebase , as opposed to all the changes introduced by the upstream branch dumped into one single merge.

Use merge -- not rebase whenever you've already pushed. Or you can read my own version of the same idea below. Rebasing a branch on master: provides an incorrect idea of how commits were created pollutes master with a bunch of intermediate commits that may not have been well tested could actually introduce build breaks on these intermediate commits because of changes that were made to master between when the original topic branch was created and when it was rebased.

Causes the timestamps on commits to not align with their chronological order in the tree. So you would see that commit A precedes commit B in master, but commit B was authored first. Produces more conflicts, because individual commits in the topic branch can each involve merge conflicts which must be individually resolved further lying in history about what happened in each commit.

If the branch being rebased has been pushed anywhere shared with anyone other than yourself then you've screwed up everyone else who has that branch since you've rewritten history. In contrast, merging a topic branch into master: preserves history of where topic branches were created, including any merges from master to the topic branch to help keep it current. You really get an accurate idea of what code the developer was working with when they were building.

If you integrate your topic branch to master periodically, folks can keep building on the topic branch, and it can keep being merged independently. Andrew Arnott Andrew Arnott Also, git merge has the "--no-ff" no fast-forward option that allows you to revert all the changes introduced by a certain merge really easily. Just ti make it more clear: You refer to the situation 'whenever you've already pushed' -- this should be bold. The Link to Linus post is great, btw. We're doing it like that so most topic branches have as a last commit "merge branch master into topic AndrewArnott "Most topic branches should be able to merge without conflicts into their target branches" How should that be possible when 20 devs are working on 30 branches?

There will be merges while you're working on yours - so of course you have to update you topic branch from target before creating a PR Not usually, Sumit. Git can merge either direction just fine even though changes have been made to either or both branches. Only when the same lines of code or very close are modified across two branches will you get conflicts.

If that happens frequently on any team, the team should rethink how they distribute work since resolving conflicts is a tax and slows them down. Show 8 more comments. I just created a FAQ for my team in my own words which answers this question. Let me share: What is a merge?

A commit, that combines all changes of a different branch into the current. What is a rebase? Re-comitting all commits of the current branch onto a different base commit. What are the main differences between merge and rebase?

In which situations should we use a merge? In which situations should we use a rebase? Why not use merge to merge changes from the base branch into a feature branch? Example Git History when using merge : Note the many commits starting with Merge branch 'main' into Example Git History when using rebase : Much cleaner Git history with much less merge commits and no cluttered visual branch merge loops whatsoever.

Yes: Because a rebase moves commits technically re-executes them , the commit date of all moved commits will be the time of the rebase and the git history loses the initial commit time. So, if the exact date of a commit is needed for some reason, then merge is the better option.

But typically, a clean git history is much more useful than exact commit dates. If the rebased branch has multiple commits that change the same line and that line was also changed in the base branch, you might need to solve merge conflicts for that same line multiple times, which you never need to do when merging.

So, on average, there's more merge conflicts to solve. Tips to reduce merge conflicts when using rebase : Rebase often. I typically recommend doing it at least once a day. Try to squash changes on the same line into one commit as much as possible. Jeehut Jeehut I would remove the downside 2 completely from your list because, as you said, squashing is a perfect solution to 2 and it always works — Nir O.

This makes it really clear. Thanks, very useful. This highlights an important point of there being multiple merge commits that can be avoided using rebase.

TLDR: It depends on what is most important - a tidy history or a true representation of the sequence of development If a tidy history is the most important, then you would rebase first and then merge your changes, so it is clear exactly what the new code is. If true representation of sequence is the most important, you would merge without rebasing. Carl Carl A merge with master could result in a fast forward.

In a feature branch there may be some commits, which have minor bugs or dont't even compile. If you do only unit testing in a feature branch, some errors in integration my slip through.

Before merging with master, integration tests are required and can show some bugs. If these are fixed, the feature could be integrated. As you don't wish to commit buggy code to master, a rebase seems neccessary in order to prevent an all-commits-fast-forward. If you follow the history of two branches in a project, they always have at least one commit in common: at this point in time, both branches had the same content and then evolved differently.

The goal of an integration is to combine the current states of two branches. Therefore, their respective latest revisions are of special interest. Combining these three commits will result in the integration we're aiming for.

Fast-Forward or Merge Commit In very simple cases, one of the two branches doesn't have any new commits since the branching happened - its latest commit is still the common ancestor.

In a lot of cases, however, both branches moved forward individually. Integrating with Rebase Some people prefer to go without such automatic merge commits. Abdullah Khan Abdullah Khan 10k 5 5 gold badges 57 57 silver badges 68 68 bronze badges. That allows you to resolve any conflicts in your branch meaning, in isolation,. This is a consequence of the Golden Rule of Rebasing : The golden rule of git rebase is to never use it on public branches.

In other words : Never rebase anything you've pushed somewhere. Basically, use git pull --rebase instead of git pull : What's missing in the article though, is that you can enable it by default : git config --global pull. Joaquin Sargiotto Joaquin Sargiotto 1, 10 10 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. Basically a merge will take two commits and combine them.

Merges do not combine commits - that would be rewriting history. Rebase does that. I'm not sure why you can't rebase on a feature branch, then merge on a public branch. Generally use merge If you are only one developer you can use rebase to have a clear history.

In shared projects when you use rebase cache sums are changed. IMO, this does not answer the question about when to use rebase or merge — Nico Haase. In some cases, you want to rebase your feature branch to get the commits from master.

For large projects it is usefull to do rebase to avoid having other peoples commit be marked as yours when you do a Pull Request. This doesn't answer the OP's question: you're just outputting your personal view over not using rebase. Some practical examples, somewhat connected to large scale development where Gerrit is used for review and delivery integration: I merge when I uplift my feature branch to a fresh remote master.

Martin G Martin G It was explained many times what rebase and what merge is, but when should you use what? When should you use rebase? When should you use merge? Jeremy Benks Jeremy Benks 1, 2 2 gold badges 15 15 silver badges 19 19 bronze badges. It is the other way round. If you rebase, your history is rewritten and therefore some information is lost.

Merge doesn't alter nor loose any history, so your points are wrong. The one most important point you miss is that the rebase means that you have a linear history. Your answer misses the point of rebasing! Marnen Laibow-Koser Marnen Laibow-Koser 5, 1 1 gold badge 25 25 silver badges 30 30 bronze badges.

IMHO opinion has little place in this sort of thing: it's a fact that losing your actual history makes life harder later. Merge will never lead to corrupted history etc. I don't know why this answer has lots of downvotes. I had to upvote to minimize the damage.

I partially agree, but I think we can rebase if we're the only one working in the branch to keep everything cleaner. The main problem is if for some unexpected reason others start working on it as well.

Git archive. Git Cheatsheet. Getting Started Setting up a repository git init git clone git config git alias. Saving changes git add git commit git diff git stash. Inspecting a repository git status git tag git blame. Undoing changes git checkout git clean git revert git reset git rm. Rewriting history git commit --amend git rebase git rebase -i git reflog.

Collaborating Syncing git remote git fetch git push git pull. Using branches git branch git checkout git merge Merge conflicts Merge strategies. Migrate to Git from SVN. Perforce to Git - why to make the move. Migrating from Perforce to Git. How to move a Git repository with history. Advanced Tips Advanced Git Tutorials. Merging vs. Resetting, Checking Out, and Reverting. Git submodules. Git subtree.

Large repositories in Git. Git LFS. Git gc. Git prune. Git Bash. How to store dotfiles. Git Cherry Pick. Conceptual Overview The first thing to understand about git rebase is that it solves the same problem as git merge.