How do I use 'git rebase -i' to rebase all changes in a branch?

Question

Here\'s an example:

>git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
>git checkout -b test-branch
>vi test.c
>git add t         


        

Answer 1

The issue with all provided solutions is, they do not allow you to rebase from the very first commit. If the first commit hash is XYZ and you do:

git rebase -i XYZ

You only rebase starting from the 2nd commit.

If you want to rebase from the first commit you do:

git rebase -i --root

Answer 2

The problem with rebasing from a different branch

The problem with git rebase -i master is that you may have merge conflicts that you don't necessarily want to deal with at the moment, or you may fix a conflict in one commit, only to fix it again in another commit during the course of the rebase.

The problem with rebasing from a known commit

The whole problem here is that you have to know which commit you have to refer to, either by its SHA, or HEAD~x, etc. This is only a minor annoyance but it is an annoyance.

The better way

If you instead want to rebase all the commits in your current branch, since the most recent commit it shared with its parent branch, you can add the following alias to .gitconfig:

rbi = !sh -c \"git rebase -i `git merge-base $1 HEAD`\" -

Usage

git rbi parentBranch

How it works

This alias is just a shell script, that is using an argument which refers to the parent branch. That argument is passed into git merge-base in order to determine the most recent shared commit between that branch, and the current branch.