git remove merge commit from history

Question

My Git history looks like that      I would like to squash the purple commits into a single one  I don t want to see them ever again in my commit log   I ve tried to do a git rebase -i 1  but even though 1 is on the blue branch  cf  picture   I still see every commit on my purple branch   How can I completely remove the purple branch  from commit log

User · Answer

There are two ways to tackle this based on what you want:

Solution 1: Remove purple commits, preserving history (incase you want to roll back)

git revert -m 1 <SHA of merge>

-m 1 specifies which parent line to choose

Purple commits will still be there in history but since you have reverted, you will not see code from those commits.

Solution 2: Completely remove purple commits (disruptive change if repo is shared)

git rebase -i <SHA before branching out>

and delete (remove lines) corresponding to purple commits.

This would be less tricky if commits were not made after merge. Additional commits increase the chance of conflicts during revert/rebase.

User · Answer

Starting with the repo in the original state    To remove the merge commit and squash the branch into a single commit in the mainline    Use these commands  replacing 5 and 1 with the SHAs of the corresponding commits    git checkout 5 git reset --soft 1 git commit --amend -m  1 2 3 4 5  git rebase HEAD master   To retain a merge commit but squash the branch commits into one     Use these commands  replacing 5  1 and C with the SHAs of the corresponding commits    git checkout -b tempbranch 5 git reset --soft 1 git commit --amend -m  1 2 3 4 5  git checkout C git merge --no-ff tempbranch git rebase HEAD master   To remove the merge commit and replace it with individual commits from the branch    Just do  replacing 5 with the SHA of the corresponding commit    git rebase 5 master   And finally  to remove the branch entirely    Use this command  replacing C and D with the SHAs of the corresponding commits    git rebase --onto C D  master

User · Answer

Do git rebase -i  lt sha before the branches diverged gt  this will allow you to remove the merge commit and the log will be one single line as you wanted   You can also delete any commits that you do not want any more   The reason that your rebase wasn t working was that you weren t going back far enough   WARNING   You are rewriting history doing this   Doing this with changes that have been pushed to a remote repo will cause issues   I recommend only doing this with commits that are local

User · Answer

To Just Remove a Merge Commit  If all you want to do is to remove a merge commit  2  so that it is like it never happened  the command is simply as follows  git rebase --onto  lt sha of 1 gt   lt sha of 2 gt   lt blue branch gt   And now the purple branch isn t in the commit log of blue at all and you have two separate branches again   You can then squash the purple independently and do whatever other manipulations you want without the merge commit in the way

[git] git remove merge commit from history

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-merge

Examples related to git-rebase