A clean merge for branches

Once the work on a side branch is completed, usually all updates need to be merge to the master branch. To do that it’s possible to use the classic approach:

Assuming the branch feature-x should be merge to masterjust type

git checkout master
git merge feature-x

With that a merge commit will be created and the master branch will display all commits made previously on the side branch. One way to avoid this is to rebase and squash all commits into one and then merge that single commit to master

git rebase -i HEAD~n

Where n are the number of commit you want to squash. Or just rebase from the first commit of the new branch

git rebase -i hash_commit

In the example below I want to merge all commit related to the script into the master branch. So I can use

git rebase -i HEAD~3        // or
git rebase -i 2a62715

Then it’s possible to choose which commits to pick and which to squash (or reword, edit and so on)

Once the commits to be squashed are being selected, close and save. Then it will be possible to change/add the message for this big one commit

Finally it’s time to merge the commit. With git log it’s possible to check the result