How to squash commits in git after they have been pushed?

Question

How to squash commits in git after they have been pushed?

Question

This gives a good explanation of squashing multiple commits:

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching-Rebasing

but it does not work for commits that have already been pushed. How do I squash the most recent few commits both in my local and remote repos?

EDIT: When I do git rebase -i origin/master~4 master, keep the first one as pick, set the other three as squash, and then exit (via c-x c-c in emacs), I get:

$ git rebase -i origin/master~4 master
# Not currently on any branch.
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Could not apply 2f40e2c... Revert "issue 4427: bpf device permission change option added"
$ git rebase -i origin/master~4 master
Interactive rebase already started

where 2f40 is the pick commit. And now none of the 4 commits appear in git log. I expected my editor to be restarted so that I could enter a commit message. What am I doing wrong?

Loren

2014/09/10

Read less...

On a branch I was able to do it like this (for the last 4 commits)

git checkout my_branch
git reset --soft HEAD~4
git commit
git push --force origin my_branch

jakob-r

2015/09/16

Minor difference to accepted answer, but I was having a lot of difficulty squashing and finally got it.

$ git rebase -i HEAD~4

At the interactive screen that opens up, replace pick with squash at the top for all the commits that you want to squash.
Save and close the editor through esc --> :wq

Push to the remote using:

$ git push origin branch-name --force

BLRBoy

2017/12/22

A lot of problems can be avoided by only creating a branch to work on & not working on master:

git checkout -b mybranch

The following works for remote commits already pushed & a mixture of remote pushed commits / local only commits:

# example merging 4 commits

git checkout mybranch
git rebase -i mybranch~4 mybranch

# at the interactive screen
# choose fixup for commit: 2 / 3 / 4

git push -u origin +mybranch

I also have some pull request notes which may be helpful.

Stuart Cardall

2016/09/05

git rebase -i master

you will get the editor vm open and msgs something like this

Pick 2994283490 commit msg1
f 7994283490 commit msg2
f 4654283490 commit msg3
f 5694283490 commit msg4
#Some message 
#
#some more

Here I have changed pick for all the other commits to "f" (Stands for fixup).

git push -f origin feature/feature-branch-name-xyz

this will fixup all the commits to one commit and will remove all the other commits . I did this and it helped me.

Nupur

2017/09/26

When you are working with a Gitlab or Github you can run in trouble in this way. You squash your commits with one of the above method. My preferite one is:

git rebase -i HEAD~4
or
git rebase -i origin/master

select squash or fixup for yours commit. At this point you would check with git status. And the message could be:

    On branch ABC-1916-remote
    Your branch and 'origin/ABC-1916' have diverged,
    and have 1 and 7 different commits each, respectively.
      (use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours)

And you can be tempted to pull it. DO NOT DO THAT or you will be in the same situation as before.

Instead push to your origin with:

git push origin +ABC-1916-remote:ABC-1916

The + allow to force push only to one branch.

Alex

2019/08/13

Alan Haggai Alavi · Accepted Answer · 10/11/2019 9:34:37 PM

Squash commits locally with

git rebase -i origin/master~4 master

and then force push with

git push origin +master

Difference between `--force` and `+`

From the documentation of git push:

Note that --force applies to all the refs that are pushed, hence using it with push.default set to matching or with multiple push destinations configured with remote.*.push may overwrite refs other than the current branch (including local refs that are strictly behind their remote counterpart). To force a push to only one branch, use a + in front of the refspec to push (e.g git push origin +master to force a push to the master branch).