How to avoid tons of commits when debugging Heroku app

Question

While trying to sort out bugs with apps on Heroku, I usually end up with a bunch of Git commits related to the bug fixing process, as I need to commit the updates in order t

Answer 1

Create a new branch when you start debugging (git checkout -b debugging or similar), and then make all your commits on there, pushing them to Heroku instead of your master via git push heroku debugging:master.

Then when you've fixed the problem, you can squash your debugging changes into a single commit and merge them back into master:

git checkout master
git merge debugging --squash
git branch -D debugging

There are lots of other ways to go about doing this, it all comes down to which you find the most logical.

Answer 2

You don't really want to clean up these commits. What you want to do instead is encapsulate them in a merge commit:

• Check out master -- git checkout master
• Create a branch for your topic -- git checkout -b my-cool-bugfix
• Do the work on your branch
• When ready, git checkout master again, then do a non-fast-forward merge. This is essential: forcing non-fast-forward with the --no-ff option means that a merge commit will always be created. In this case, the command would be git merge --no-ff my-cool-bugfix.
• You now have one merge commit on master that encapsulates all your branch commits, but retains the commit history so that Git's history analysis tools don't break.
• When you've tested the fix, git push heroku.

Answer 3

You can do a git rebase -i <commit_before_fixing_commits> and edit / squash / drop the commits and then push to Heroku.