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TLDR: git-rebase (tldr-pages)

Reapply commits from one branch on top of another branch.

  • Rebase the current branch on top of another specified branch
    git rebase {{new_base_branch}}
  • Start an interactive rebase, which allows the commits to be reordered, omitted, combined, or modified
    git rebase {{-i|--interactive}} {{target_base_branch_or_commit_hash}}
  • Continue a rebase that was interrupted by a merge failure, after editing conflicting files
    git rebase --continue
  • Continue a rebase that was paused due to merge conflicts, by skipping the conflicted commit
    git rebase --skip
  • Abort a rebase in progress (e.g. if it is interrupted by a merge conflict)
    git rebase --abort
  • Move part of the current branch onto a new base, providing the old base to start from
    git rebase --onto {{new_base}} {{old_base}}
  • Reapply the last 5 commits in-place, stopping to allow them to be reordered, omitted, combined, or modified
    git rebase {{-i|--interactive}} {{HEAD~5}}
  • Auto-resolve any conflicts by favoring the working branch version (`theirs` keyword has reversed meaning in this case)
    git rebase {{-X|--strategy-option}} theirs {{branch_name}}
GIT-REBASE(1)                                Git Manual                                GIT-REBASE(1)



NAME
       git-rebase - Reapply commits on top of another base tip

SYNOPSIS
       git rebase [-i | --interactive] [<options>] [--exec <cmd>]
               [--onto <newbase> | --keep-base] [<upstream> [<branch>]]
       git rebase [-i | --interactive] [<options>] [--exec <cmd>] [--onto <newbase>]
               --root [<branch>]
       git rebase (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit | --edit-todo | --show-current-patch)


DESCRIPTION
       If <branch> is specified, git rebase will perform an automatic git switch <branch> before
       doing anything else. Otherwise it remains on the current branch.

       If <upstream> is not specified, the upstream configured in branch.<name>.remote and
       branch.<name>.merge options will be used (see git-config(1) for details) and the --fork-point
       option is assumed. If you are currently not on any branch or if the current branch does not
       have a configured upstream, the rebase will abort.

       All changes made by commits in the current branch but that are not in <upstream> are saved to
       a temporary area. This is the same set of commits that would be shown by git log
       <upstream>..HEAD; or by git log 'fork_point'..HEAD, if --fork-point is active (see the
       description on --fork-point below); or by git log HEAD, if the --root option is specified.

       The current branch is reset to <upstream>, or <newbase> if the --onto option was supplied.
       This has the exact same effect as git reset --hard <upstream> (or <newbase>). ORIG_HEAD is
       set to point at the tip of the branch before the reset.

       The commits that were previously saved into the temporary area are then reapplied to the
       current branch, one by one, in order. Note that any commits in HEAD which introduce the same
       textual changes as a commit in HEAD..<upstream> are omitted (i.e., a patch already accepted
       upstream with a different commit message or timestamp will be skipped).

       It is possible that a merge failure will prevent this process from being completely
       automatic. You will have to resolve any such merge failure and run git rebase --continue.
       Another option is to bypass the commit that caused the merge failure with git rebase --skip.
       To check out the original <branch> and remove the .git/rebase-apply working files, use the
       command git rebase --abort instead.

       Assume the following history exists and the current branch is "topic":

                     A---B---C topic
                    /
               D---E---F---G master


       From this point, the result of either of the following commands:

           git rebase master
           git rebase master topic

       would be:

                             A'--B'--C' topic
                            /
               D---E---F---G master


       NOTE: The latter form is just a short-hand of git checkout topic followed by git rebase
       master. When rebase exits topic will remain the checked-out branch.

       If the upstream branch already contains a change you have made (e.g., because you mailed a
       patch which was applied upstream), then that commit will be skipped and warnings will be
       issued (if the merge backend is used). For example, running git rebase master on the
       following history (in which A' and A introduce the same set of changes, but have different
       committer information):

                     A---B---C topic
                    /
               D---E---A'---F master


       will result in:

                              B'---C' topic
                             /
               D---E---A'---F master


       Here is how you would transplant a topic branch based on one branch to another, to pretend
       that you forked the topic branch from the latter branch, using rebase --onto.

       First let’s assume your topic is based on branch next. For example, a feature developed in
       topic depends on some functionality which is found in next.

               o---o---o---o---o  master
                    \
                     o---o---o---o---o  next
                                      \
                                       o---o---o  topic


       We want to make topic forked from branch master; for example, because the functionality on
       which topic depends was merged into the more stable master branch. We want our tree to look
       like this:

               o---o---o---o---o  master
                   |            \
                   |             o'--o'--o'  topic
                    \
                     o---o---o---o---o  next


       We can get this using the following command:

           git rebase --onto master next topic

       Another example of --onto option is to rebase part of a branch. If we have the following
       situation:

                                       H---I---J topicB
                                      /
                             E---F---G  topicA
                            /
               A---B---C---D  master


       then the command

           git rebase --onto master topicA topicB

       would result in:

                            H'--I'--J'  topicB
                           /
                           | E---F---G  topicA
                           |/
               A---B---C---D  master


       This is useful when topicB does not depend on topicA.

       A range of commits could also be removed with rebase. If we have the following situation:

               E---F---G---H---I---J  topicA


       then the command

           git rebase --onto topicA~5 topicA~3 topicA

       would result in the removal of commits F and G:

               E---H'---I'---J'  topicA


       This is useful if F and G were flawed in some way, or should not be part of topicA. Note that
       the argument to --onto and the <upstream> parameter can be any valid commit-ish.

       In case of conflict, git rebase will stop at the first problematic commit and leave conflict
       markers in the tree. You can use git diff to locate the markers (<<<<<<) and make edits to
       resolve the conflict. For each file you edit, you need to tell Git that the conflict has been
       resolved, typically this would be done with

           git add <filename>

       After resolving the conflict manually and updating the index with the desired resolution, you
       can continue the rebasing process with

           git rebase --continue

       Alternatively, you can undo the git rebase with

           git rebase --abort

OPTIONS
       --onto <newbase>
           Starting point at which to create the new commits. If the --onto option is not specified,
           the starting point is <upstream>. May be any valid commit, and not just an existing
           branch name.

           As a special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if
           there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case
           it defaults to HEAD.

       --keep-base
           Set the starting point at which to create the new commits to the merge base of <upstream>
           <branch>. Running git rebase --keep-base <upstream> <branch> is equivalent to running git
           rebase --onto <upstream>... <upstream>.

           This option is useful in the case where one is developing a feature on top of an upstream
           branch. While the feature is being worked on, the upstream branch may advance and it may
           not be the best idea to keep rebasing on top of the upstream but to keep the base commit
           as-is.

           Although both this option and --fork-point find the merge base between <upstream> and
           <branch>, this option uses the merge base as the starting point on which new commits will
           be created, whereas --fork-point uses the merge base to determine the set of commits
           which will be rebased.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       <upstream>
           Upstream branch to compare against. May be any valid commit, not just an existing branch
           name. Defaults to the configured upstream for the current branch.

       <branch>
           Working branch; defaults to HEAD.

       --continue
           Restart the rebasing process after having resolved a merge conflict.

       --abort
           Abort the rebase operation and reset HEAD to the original branch. If <branch> was
           provided when the rebase operation was started, then HEAD will be reset to <branch>.
           Otherwise HEAD will be reset to where it was when the rebase operation was started.

       --quit
           Abort the rebase operation but HEAD is not reset back to the original branch. The index
           and working tree are also left unchanged as a result. If a temporary stash entry was
           created using --autostash, it will be saved to the stash list.

       --apply
           Use applying strategies to rebase (calling git-am internally). This option may become a
           no-op in the future once the merge backend handles everything the apply one does.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --empty={drop,keep,ask}
           How to handle commits that are not empty to start and are not clean cherry-picks of any
           upstream commit, but which become empty after rebasing (because they contain a subset of
           already upstream changes). With drop (the default), commits that become empty are
           dropped. With keep, such commits are kept. With ask (implied by --interactive), the
           rebase will halt when an empty commit is applied allowing you to choose whether to drop
           it, edit files more, or just commit the empty changes. Other options, like --exec, will
           use the default of drop unless -i/--interactive is explicitly specified.

           Note that commits which start empty are kept (unless --no-keep-empty is specified), and
           commits which are clean cherry-picks (as determined by git log --cherry-mark ...) are
           detected and dropped as a preliminary step (unless --reapply-cherry-picks is passed).

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --no-keep-empty, --keep-empty
           Do not keep commits that start empty before the rebase (i.e. that do not change anything
           from its parent) in the result. The default is to keep commits which start empty, since
           creating such commits requires passing the --allow-empty override flag to git commit,
           signifying that a user is very intentionally creating such a commit and thus wants to
           keep it.

           Usage of this flag will probably be rare, since you can get rid of commits that start
           empty by just firing up an interactive rebase and removing the lines corresponding to the
           commits you don’t want. This flag exists as a convenient shortcut, such as for cases
           where external tools generate many empty commits and you want them all removed.

           For commits which do not start empty but become empty after rebasing, see the --empty
           flag.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --reapply-cherry-picks, --no-reapply-cherry-picks
           Reapply all clean cherry-picks of any upstream commit instead of preemptively dropping
           them. (If these commits then become empty after rebasing, because they contain a subset
           of already upstream changes, the behavior towards them is controlled by the --empty
           flag.)

           By default (or if --no-reapply-cherry-picks is given), these commits will be
           automatically dropped. Because this necessitates reading all upstream commits, this can
           be expensive in repos with a large number of upstream commits that need to be read. When
           using the merge backend, warnings will be issued for each dropped commit (unless --quiet
           is given). Advice will also be issued unless advice.skippedCherryPicks is set to false
           (see git-config(1)).

           --reapply-cherry-picks allows rebase to forgo reading all upstream commits, potentially
           improving performance.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --allow-empty-message
           No-op. Rebasing commits with an empty message used to fail and this option would override
           that behavior, allowing commits with empty messages to be rebased. Now commits with an
           empty message do not cause rebasing to halt.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --skip
           Restart the rebasing process by skipping the current patch.

       --edit-todo
           Edit the todo list during an interactive rebase.

       --show-current-patch
           Show the current patch in an interactive rebase or when rebase is stopped because of
           conflicts. This is the equivalent of git show REBASE_HEAD.

       -m, --merge
           Using merging strategies to rebase (default).

           Note that a rebase merge works by replaying each commit from the working branch on top of
           the <upstream> branch. Because of this, when a merge conflict happens, the side reported
           as ours is the so-far rebased series, starting with <upstream>, and theirs is the working
           branch. In other words, the sides are swapped.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       -s <strategy>, --strategy=<strategy>
           Use the given merge strategy, instead of the default ort. This implies --merge.

           Because git rebase replays each commit from the working branch on top of the <upstream>
           branch using the given strategy, using the ours strategy simply empties all patches from
           the <branch>, which makes little sense.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       -X <strategy-option>, --strategy-option=<strategy-option>
           Pass the <strategy-option> through to the merge strategy. This implies --merge and, if no
           strategy has been specified, -s ort. Note the reversal of ours and theirs as noted above
           for the -m option.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --rerere-autoupdate, --no-rerere-autoupdate
           Allow the rerere mechanism to update the index with the result of auto-conflict
           resolution if possible.

       -S[<keyid>], --gpg-sign[=<keyid>], --no-gpg-sign
           GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity;
           if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space.  --no-gpg-sign is useful to
           countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.

       -q, --quiet
           Be quiet. Implies --no-stat.

       -v, --verbose
           Be verbose. Implies --stat.

       --stat
           Show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase. The diffstat is also
           controlled by the configuration option rebase.stat.

       -n, --no-stat
           Do not show a diffstat as part of the rebase process.

       --no-verify
           This option bypasses the pre-rebase hook. See also githooks(5).

       --verify
           Allows the pre-rebase hook to run, which is the default. This option can be used to
           override --no-verify. See also githooks(5).

       -C<n>
           Ensure at least <n> lines of surrounding context match before and after each change. When
           fewer lines of surrounding context exist they all must match. By default no context is
           ever ignored. Implies --apply.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --no-ff, --force-rebase, -f
           Individually replay all rebased commits instead of fast-forwarding over the unchanged
           ones. This ensures that the entire history of the rebased branch is composed of new
           commits.

           You may find this helpful after reverting a topic branch merge, as this option recreates
           the topic branch with fresh commits so it can be remerged successfully without needing to
           "revert the reversion" (see the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To[1] for details).

       --fork-point, --no-fork-point
           Use reflog to find a better common ancestor between <upstream> and <branch> when
           calculating which commits have been introduced by <branch>.

           When --fork-point is active, fork_point will be used instead of <upstream> to calculate
           the set of commits to rebase, where fork_point is the result of git merge-base
           --fork-point <upstream> <branch> command (see git-merge-base(1)). If fork_point ends up
           being empty, the <upstream> will be used as a fallback.

           If <upstream> is given on the command line, then the default is --no-fork-point,
           otherwise the default is --fork-point. See also rebase.forkpoint in git-config(1).

           If your branch was based on <upstream> but <upstream> was rewound and your branch
           contains commits which were dropped, this option can be used with --keep-base in order to
           drop those commits from your branch.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --ignore-whitespace
           Ignore whitespace differences when trying to reconcile differences. Currently, each
           backend implements an approximation of this behavior:

           apply backend: When applying a patch, ignore changes in whitespace in context lines.
           Unfortunately, this means that if the "old" lines being replaced by the patch differ only
           in whitespace from the existing file, you will get a merge conflict instead of a
           successful patch application.

           merge backend: Treat lines with only whitespace changes as unchanged when merging.
           Unfortunately, this means that any patch hunks that were intended to modify whitespace
           and nothing else will be dropped, even if the other side had no changes that conflicted.

       --whitespace=<option>
           This flag is passed to the git apply program (see git-apply(1)) that applies the patch.
           Implies --apply.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --committer-date-is-author-date
           Instead of using the current time as the committer date, use the author date of the
           commit being rebased as the committer date. This option implies --force-rebase.

       --ignore-date, --reset-author-date
           Instead of using the author date of the original commit, use the current time as the
           author date of the rebased commit. This option implies --force-rebase.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --signoff
           Add a Signed-off-by trailer to all the rebased commits. Note that if --interactive is
           given then only commits marked to be picked, edited or reworded will have the trailer
           added.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       -i, --interactive
           Make a list of the commits which are about to be rebased. Let the user edit that list
           before rebasing. This mode can also be used to split commits (see SPLITTING COMMITS
           below).

           The commit list format can be changed by setting the configuration option
           rebase.instructionFormat. A customized instruction format will automatically have the
           long commit hash prepended to the format.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       -r, --rebase-merges[=(rebase-cousins|no-rebase-cousins)]
           By default, a rebase will simply drop merge commits from the todo list, and put the
           rebased commits into a single, linear branch. With --rebase-merges, the rebase will
           instead try to preserve the branching structure within the commits that are to be
           rebased, by recreating the merge commits. Any resolved merge conflicts or manual
           amendments in these merge commits will have to be resolved/re-applied manually.

           By default, or when no-rebase-cousins was specified, commits which do not have <upstream>
           as direct ancestor will keep their original branch point, i.e. commits that would be
           excluded by git-log(1)'s --ancestry-path option will keep their original ancestry by
           default. If the rebase-cousins mode is turned on, such commits are instead rebased onto
           <upstream> (or <onto>, if specified).

           It is currently only possible to recreate the merge commits using the ort merge strategy;
           different merge strategies can be used only via explicit exec git merge -s <strategy>
           [...]  commands.

           See also REBASING MERGES and INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       -x <cmd>, --exec <cmd>
           Append "exec <cmd>" after each line creating a commit in the final history. <cmd> will be
           interpreted as one or more shell commands. Any command that fails will interrupt the
           rebase, with exit code 1.

           You may execute several commands by either using one instance of --exec with several
           commands:

               git rebase -i --exec "cmd1 && cmd2 && ..."

           or by giving more than one --exec:

               git rebase -i --exec "cmd1" --exec "cmd2" --exec ...

           If --autosquash is used, "exec" lines will not be appended for the intermediate commits,
           and will only appear at the end of each squash/fixup series.

           This uses the --interactive machinery internally, but it can be run without an explicit
           --interactive.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --root
           Rebase all commits reachable from <branch>, instead of limiting them with an <upstream>.
           This allows you to rebase the root commit(s) on a branch. When used with --onto, it will
           skip changes already contained in <newbase> (instead of <upstream>) whereas without
           --onto it will operate on every change.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --autosquash, --no-autosquash
           When the commit log message begins with "squash! ..." or "fixup! ..." or "amend! ...",
           and there is already a commit in the todo list that matches the same ..., automatically
           modify the todo list of rebase -i, so that the commit marked for squashing comes right
           after the commit to be modified, and change the action of the moved commit from pick to
           squash or fixup or fixup -C respectively. A commit matches the ...  if the commit subject
           matches, or if the ...  refers to the commit’s hash. As a fall-back, partial matches of
           the commit subject work, too. The recommended way to create fixup/amend/squash commits is
           by using the --fixup, --fixup=amend: or --fixup=reword: and --squash options respectively
           of git-commit(1).

           If the --autosquash option is enabled by default using the configuration variable
           rebase.autoSquash, this option can be used to override and disable this setting.

           See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

       --autostash, --no-autostash
           Automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, and apply it
           after the operation ends. This means that you can run rebase on a dirty worktree.
           However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful rebase might
           result in non-trivial conflicts.

       --reschedule-failed-exec, --no-reschedule-failed-exec
           Automatically reschedule exec commands that failed. This only makes sense in interactive
           mode (or when an --exec option was provided).

           Even though this option applies once a rebase is started, it’s set for the whole rebase
           at the start based on either the rebase.rescheduleFailedExec configuration (see git-
           config(1) or "CONFIGURATION" below) or whether this option is provided. Otherwise an
           explicit --no-reschedule-failed-exec at the start would be overridden by the presence of
           rebase.rescheduleFailedExec=true configuration.

INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS
       The following options:

       •   --apply

       •   --whitespace

       •   -C

       are incompatible with the following options:

       •   --merge

       •   --strategy

       •   --strategy-option

       •   --allow-empty-message

       •   --[no-]autosquash

       •   --rebase-merges

       •   --interactive

       •   --exec

       •   --no-keep-empty

       •   --empty=

       •   --reapply-cherry-picks

       •   --edit-todo

       •   --root when used in combination with --onto

       In addition, the following pairs of options are incompatible:

       •   --keep-base and --onto

       •   --keep-base and --root

       •   --fork-point and --root

BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES
       git rebase has two primary backends: apply and merge. (The apply backend used to be known as
       the am backend, but the name led to confusion as it looks like a verb instead of a noun.
       Also, the merge backend used to be known as the interactive backend, but it is now used for
       non-interactive cases as well. Both were renamed based on lower-level functionality that
       underpinned each.) There are some subtle differences in how these two backends behave:

   Empty commits
       The apply backend unfortunately drops intentionally empty commits, i.e. commits that started
       empty, though these are rare in practice. It also drops commits that become empty and has no
       option for controlling this behavior.

       The merge backend keeps intentionally empty commits by default (though with -i they are
       marked as empty in the todo list editor, or they can be dropped automatically with
       --no-keep-empty).

       Similar to the apply backend, by default the merge backend drops commits that become empty
       unless -i/--interactive is specified (in which case it stops and asks the user what to do).
       The merge backend also has an --empty={drop,keep,ask} option for changing the behavior of
       handling commits that become empty.

   Directory rename detection
       Due to the lack of accurate tree information (arising from constructing fake ancestors with
       the limited information available in patches), directory rename detection is disabled in the
       apply backend. Disabled directory rename detection means that if one side of history renames
       a directory and the other adds new files to the old directory, then the new files will be
       left behind in the old directory without any warning at the time of rebasing that you may
       want to move these files into the new directory.

       Directory rename detection works with the merge backend to provide you warnings in such
       cases.

   Context
       The apply backend works by creating a sequence of patches (by calling format-patch
       internally), and then applying the patches in sequence (calling am internally). Patches are
       composed of multiple hunks, each with line numbers, a context region, and the actual changes.
       The line numbers have to be taken with some fuzz, since the other side will likely have
       inserted or deleted lines earlier in the file. The context region is meant to help find how
       to adjust the line numbers in order to apply the changes to the right lines. However, if
       multiple areas of the code have the same surrounding lines of context, the wrong one can be
       picked. There are real-world cases where this has caused commits to be reapplied incorrectly
       with no conflicts reported. Setting diff.context to a larger value may prevent such types of
       problems, but increases the chance of spurious conflicts (since it will require more lines of
       matching context to apply).

       The merge backend works with a full copy of each relevant file, insulating it from these
       types of problems.

   Labelling of conflicts markers
       When there are content conflicts, the merge machinery tries to annotate each side’s conflict
       markers with the commits where the content came from. Since the apply backend drops the
       original information about the rebased commits and their parents (and instead generates new
       fake commits based off limited information in the generated patches), those commits cannot be
       identified; instead it has to fall back to a commit summary. Also, when merge.conflictStyle
       is set to diff3, the apply backend will use "constructed merge base" to label the content
       from the merge base, and thus provide no information about the merge base commit whatsoever.

       The merge backend works with the full commits on both sides of history and thus has no such
       limitations.

   Hooks
       The apply backend has not traditionally called the post-commit hook, while the merge backend
       has. Both have called the post-checkout hook, though the merge backend has squelched its
       output. Further, both backends only call the post-checkout hook with the starting point
       commit of the rebase, not the intermediate commits nor the final commit. In each case, the
       calling of these hooks was by accident of implementation rather than by design (both backends
       were originally implemented as shell scripts and happened to invoke other commands like git
       checkout or git commit that would call the hooks). Both backends should have the same
       behavior, though it is not entirely clear which, if any, is correct. We will likely make
       rebase stop calling either of these hooks in the future.

   Interruptability
       The apply backend has safety problems with an ill-timed interrupt; if the user presses Ctrl-C
       at the wrong time to try to abort the rebase, the rebase can enter a state where it cannot be
       aborted with a subsequent git rebase --abort. The merge backend does not appear to suffer
       from the same shortcoming. (See https://lore.kernel.org/git/20200207132152.GC2868 AT szeder.dev/
       for details.)

   Commit Rewording
       When a conflict occurs while rebasing, rebase stops and asks the user to resolve. Since the
       user may need to make notable changes while resolving conflicts, after conflicts are resolved
       and the user has run git rebase --continue, the rebase should open an editor and ask the user
       to update the commit message. The merge backend does this, while the apply backend blindly
       applies the original commit message.

   Miscellaneous differences
       There are a few more behavioral differences that most folks would probably consider
       inconsequential but which are mentioned for completeness:

       •   Reflog: The two backends will use different wording when describing the changes made in
           the reflog, though both will make use of the word "rebase".

       •   Progress, informational, and error messages: The two backends provide slightly different
           progress and informational messages. Also, the apply backend writes error messages (such
           as "Your files would be overwritten...") to stdout, while the merge backend writes them
           to stderr.

       •   State directories: The two backends keep their state in different directories under .git/

MERGE STRATEGIES
       The merge mechanism (git merge and git pull commands) allows the backend merge strategies to
       be chosen with -s option. Some strategies can also take their own options, which can be
       passed by giving -X<option> arguments to git merge and/or git pull.

       ort
           This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging one branch. This strategy can
           only resolve two heads using a 3-way merge algorithm. When there is more than one common
           ancestor that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a merged tree of the common
           ancestors and uses that as the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This has been reported
           to result in fewer merge conflicts without causing mismerges by tests done on actual
           merge commits taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. Additionally this strategy
           can detect and handle merges involving renames. It does not make use of detected copies.
           The name for this algorithm is an acronym ("Ostensibly Recursive’s Twin") and came from
           the fact that it was written as a replacement for the previous default algorithm,
           recursive.

           The ort strategy can take the following options:

           ours
               This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved cleanly by favoring our
               version. Changes from the other tree that do not conflict with our side are reflected
               in the merge result. For a binary file, the entire contents are taken from our side.

               This should not be confused with the ours merge strategy, which does not even look at
               what the other tree contains at all. It discards everything the other tree did,
               declaring our history contains all that happened in it.

           theirs
               This is the opposite of ours; note that, unlike ours, there is no theirs merge
               strategy to confuse this merge option with.

           ignore-space-change, ignore-all-space, ignore-space-at-eol, ignore-cr-at-eol
               Treats lines with the indicated type of whitespace change as unchanged for the sake
               of a three-way merge. Whitespace changes mixed with other changes to a line are not
               ignored. See also git-diff(1) -b, -w, --ignore-space-at-eol, and --ignore-cr-at-eol.

               •   If their version only introduces whitespace changes to a line, our version is
                   used;

               •   If our version introduces whitespace changes but their version includes a
                   substantial change, their version is used;

               •   Otherwise, the merge proceeds in the usual way.

           renormalize
               This runs a virtual check-out and check-in of all three stages of a file when
               resolving a three-way merge. This option is meant to be used when merging branches
               with different clean filters or end-of-line normalization rules. See "Merging
               branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in gitattributes(5) for details.

           no-renormalize
               Disables the renormalize option. This overrides the merge.renormalize configuration
               variable.

           find-renames[=<n>]
               Turn on rename detection, optionally setting the similarity threshold. This is the
               default. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable. See also git-
               diff(1) --find-renames.

           rename-threshold=<n>
               Deprecated synonym for find-renames=<n>.

           subtree[=<path>]
               This option is a more advanced form of subtree strategy, where the strategy makes a
               guess on how two trees must be shifted to match with each other when merging.
               Instead, the specified path is prefixed (or stripped from the beginning) to make the
               shape of two trees to match.

       recursive
           This can only resolve two heads using a 3-way merge algorithm. When there is more than
           one common ancestor that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a merged tree of the
           common ancestors and uses that as the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This has been
           reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without causing mismerges by tests done on
           actual merge commits taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. Additionally this
           can detect and handle merges involving renames. It does not make use of detected copies.
           This was the default strategy for resolving two heads from Git v0.99.9k until v2.33.0.

           The recursive strategy takes the same options as ort. However, there are three additional
           options that ort ignores (not documented above) that are potentially useful with the
           recursive strategy:

           patience
               Deprecated synonym for diff-algorithm=patience.

           diff-algorithm=[patience|minimal|histogram|myers]
               Use a different diff algorithm while merging, which can help avoid mismerges that
               occur due to unimportant matching lines (such as braces from distinct functions). See
               also git-diff(1) --diff-algorithm. Note that ort specifically uses
               diff-algorithm=histogram, while recursive defaults to the diff.algorithm config
               setting.

           no-renames
               Turn off rename detection. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable.
               See also git-diff(1) --no-renames.

       resolve
           This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch and another branch you pulled
           from) using a 3-way merge algorithm. It tries to carefully detect criss-cross merge
           ambiguities. It does not handle renames.

       octopus
           This resolves cases with more than two heads, but refuses to do a complex merge that
           needs manual resolution. It is primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch heads
           together. This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging more than one
           branch.

       ours
           This resolves any number of heads, but the resulting tree of the merge is always that of
           the current branch head, effectively ignoring all changes from all other branches. It is
           meant to be used to supersede old development history of side branches. Note that this is
           different from the -Xours option to the recursive merge strategy.

       subtree
           This is a modified ort strategy. When merging trees A and B, if B corresponds to a
           subtree of A, B is first adjusted to match the tree structure of A, instead of reading
           the trees at the same level. This adjustment is also done to the common ancestor tree.

       With the strategies that use 3-way merge (including the default, ort), if a change is made on
       both branches, but later reverted on one of the branches, that change will be present in the
       merged result; some people find this behavior confusing. It occurs because only the heads and
       the merge base are considered when performing a merge, not the individual commits. The merge
       algorithm therefore considers the reverted change as no change at all, and substitutes the
       changed version instead.

NOTES
       You should understand the implications of using git rebase on a repository that you share.
       See also RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE below.

       When the git-rebase command is run, it will first execute a "pre-rebase" hook if one exists.
       You can use this hook to do sanity checks and reject the rebase if it isn’t appropriate.
       Please see the template pre-rebase hook script for an example.

       Upon completion, <branch> will be the current branch.

INTERACTIVE MODE
       Rebasing interactively means that you have a chance to edit the commits which are rebased.
       You can reorder the commits, and you can remove them (weeding out bad or otherwise unwanted
       patches).

       The interactive mode is meant for this type of workflow:

        1. have a wonderful idea

        2. hack on the code

        3. prepare a series for submission

        4. submit

       where point 2. consists of several instances of

       a) regular use

        1. finish something worthy of a commit

        2. commit

       b) independent fixup

        1. realize that something does not work

        2. fix that

        3. commit it

       Sometimes the thing fixed in b.2. cannot be amended to the not-quite perfect commit it fixes,
       because that commit is buried deeply in a patch series. That is exactly what interactive
       rebase is for: use it after plenty of "a"s and "b"s, by rearranging and editing commits, and
       squashing multiple commits into one.

       Start it with the last commit you want to retain as-is:

           git rebase -i <after-this-commit>

       An editor will be fired up with all the commits in your current branch (ignoring merge
       commits), which come after the given commit. You can reorder the commits in this list to your
       heart’s content, and you can remove them. The list looks more or less like this:

           pick deadbee The oneline of this commit
           pick fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
           ...


       The oneline descriptions are purely for your pleasure; git rebase will not look at them but
       at the commit names ("deadbee" and "fa1afe1" in this example), so do not delete or edit the
       names.

       By replacing the command "pick" with the command "edit", you can tell git rebase to stop
       after applying that commit, so that you can edit the files and/or the commit message, amend
       the commit, and continue rebasing.

       To interrupt the rebase (just like an "edit" command would do, but without cherry-picking any
       commit first), use the "break" command.

       If you just want to edit the commit message for a commit, replace the command "pick" with the
       command "reword".

       To drop a commit, replace the command "pick" with "drop", or just delete the matching line.

       If you want to fold two or more commits into one, replace the command "pick" for the second
       and subsequent commits with "squash" or "fixup". If the commits had different authors, the
       folded commit will be attributed to the author of the first commit. The suggested commit
       message for the folded commit is the concatenation of the first commit’s message with those
       identified by "squash" commands, omitting the messages of commits identified by "fixup"
       commands, unless "fixup -c" is used. In that case the suggested commit message is only the
       message of the "fixup -c" commit, and an editor is opened allowing you to edit the message.
       The contents (patch) of the "fixup -c" commit are still incorporated into the folded commit.
       If there is more than one "fixup -c" commit, the message from the final one is used. You can
       also use "fixup -C" to get the same behavior as "fixup -c" except without opening an editor.

       git rebase will stop when "pick" has been replaced with "edit" or when a command fails due to
       merge errors. When you are done editing and/or resolving conflicts you can continue with git
       rebase --continue.

       For example, if you want to reorder the last 5 commits, such that what was HEAD~4 becomes the
       new HEAD. To achieve that, you would call git rebase like this:

           $ git rebase -i HEAD~5


       And move the first patch to the end of the list.

       You might want to recreate merge commits, e.g. if you have a history like this:

                      X
                       \
                    A---M---B
                   /
           ---o---O---P---Q


       Suppose you want to rebase the side branch starting at "A" to "Q". Make sure that the current
       HEAD is "B", and call

           $ git rebase -i -r --onto Q O


       Reordering and editing commits usually creates untested intermediate steps. You may want to
       check that your history editing did not break anything by running a test, or at least
       recompiling at intermediate points in history by using the "exec" command (shortcut "x"). You
       may do so by creating a todo list like this one:

           pick deadbee Implement feature XXX
           fixup f1a5c00 Fix to feature XXX
           exec make
           pick c0ffeee The oneline of the next commit
           edit deadbab The oneline of the commit after
           exec cd subdir; make test
           ...


       The interactive rebase will stop when a command fails (i.e. exits with non-0 status) to give
       you an opportunity to fix the problem. You can continue with git rebase --continue.

       The "exec" command launches the command in a shell (the one specified in $SHELL, or the
       default shell if $SHELL is not set), so you can use shell features (like "cd", ">", ";" ...).
       The command is run from the root of the working tree.

           $ git rebase -i --exec "make test"


       This command lets you check that intermediate commits are compilable. The todo list becomes
       like that:

           pick 5928aea one
           exec make test
           pick 04d0fda two
           exec make test
           pick ba46169 three
           exec make test
           pick f4593f9 four
           exec make test


SPLITTING COMMITS
       In interactive mode, you can mark commits with the action "edit". However, this does not
       necessarily mean that git rebase expects the result of this edit to be exactly one commit.
       Indeed, you can undo the commit, or you can add other commits. This can be used to split a
       commit into two:

       •   Start an interactive rebase with git rebase -i <commit>^, where <commit> is the commit
           you want to split. In fact, any commit range will do, as long as it contains that commit.

       •   Mark the commit you want to split with the action "edit".

       •   When it comes to editing that commit, execute git reset HEAD^. The effect is that the
           HEAD is rewound by one, and the index follows suit. However, the working tree stays the
           same.

       •   Now add the changes to the index that you want to have in the first commit. You can use
           git add (possibly interactively) or git gui (or both) to do that.

       •   Commit the now-current index with whatever commit message is appropriate now.

       •   Repeat the last two steps until your working tree is clean.

       •   Continue the rebase with git rebase --continue.

       If you are not absolutely sure that the intermediate revisions are consistent (they compile,
       pass the testsuite, etc.) you should use git stash to stash away the not-yet-committed
       changes after each commit, test, and amend the commit if fixes are necessary.

RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE
       Rebasing (or any other form of rewriting) a branch that others have based work on is a bad
       idea: anyone downstream of it is forced to manually fix their history. This section explains
       how to do the fix from the downstream’s point of view. The real fix, however, would be to
       avoid rebasing the upstream in the first place.

       To illustrate, suppose you are in a situation where someone develops a subsystem branch, and
       you are working on a topic that is dependent on this subsystem. You might end up with a
       history like the following:

               o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                    \
                     o---o---o---o---o  subsystem
                                      \
                                       *---*---*  topic


       If subsystem is rebased against master, the following happens:

               o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                    \                       \
                     o---o---o---o---o       o'--o'--o'--o'--o'  subsystem
                                      \
                                       *---*---*  topic


       If you now continue development as usual, and eventually merge topic to subsystem, the
       commits from subsystem will remain duplicated forever:

               o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                    \                       \
                     o---o---o---o---o       o'--o'--o'--o'--o'--M  subsystem
                                      \                         /
                                       *---*---*-..........-*--*  topic


       Such duplicates are generally frowned upon because they clutter up history, making it harder
       to follow. To clean things up, you need to transplant the commits on topic to the new
       subsystem tip, i.e., rebase topic. This becomes a ripple effect: anyone downstream from topic
       is forced to rebase too, and so on!

       There are two kinds of fixes, discussed in the following subsections:

       Easy case: The changes are literally the same.
           This happens if the subsystem rebase was a simple rebase and had no conflicts.

       Hard case: The changes are not the same.
           This happens if the subsystem rebase had conflicts, or used --interactive to omit, edit,
           squash, or fixup commits; or if the upstream used one of commit --amend, reset, or a full
           history rewriting command like filter-repo[2].

   The easy case
       Only works if the changes (patch IDs based on the diff contents) on subsystem are literally
       the same before and after the rebase subsystem did.

       In that case, the fix is easy because git rebase knows to skip changes that are already
       present in the new upstream (unless --reapply-cherry-picks is given). So if you say (assuming
       you’re on topic)

               $ git rebase subsystem


       you will end up with the fixed history

               o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                                            \
                                             o'--o'--o'--o'--o'  subsystem
                                                              \
                                                               *---*---*  topic


   The hard case
       Things get more complicated if the subsystem changes do not exactly correspond to the ones
       before the rebase.

           Note
           While an "easy case recovery" sometimes appears to be successful even in the hard case,
           it may have unintended consequences. For example, a commit that was removed via git
           rebase --interactive will be resurrected!

       The idea is to manually tell git rebase "where the old subsystem ended and your topic began",
       that is, what the old merge base between them was. You will have to find a way to name the
       last commit of the old subsystem, for example:

       •   With the subsystem reflog: after git fetch, the old tip of subsystem is at subsystem@{1}.
           Subsequent fetches will increase the number. (See git-reflog(1).)

       •   Relative to the tip of topic: knowing that your topic has three commits, the old tip of
           subsystem must be topic~3.

       You can then transplant the old subsystem..topic to the new tip by saying (for the reflog
       case, and assuming you are on topic already):

               $ git rebase --onto subsystem subsystem@{1}


       The ripple effect of a "hard case" recovery is especially bad: everyone downstream from topic
       will now have to perform a "hard case" recovery too!

REBASING MERGES
       The interactive rebase command was originally designed to handle individual patch series. As
       such, it makes sense to exclude merge commits from the todo list, as the developer may have
       merged the then-current master while working on the branch, only to rebase all the commits
       onto master eventually (skipping the merge commits).

       However, there are legitimate reasons why a developer may want to recreate merge commits: to
       keep the branch structure (or "commit topology") when working on multiple, inter-related
       branches.

       In the following example, the developer works on a topic branch that refactors the way
       buttons are defined, and on another topic branch that uses that refactoring to implement a
       "Report a bug" button. The output of git log --graph --format=%s -5 may look like this:

           *   Merge branch 'report-a-bug'
           |\
           | * Add the feedback button
           * | Merge branch 'refactor-button'
           |\ \
           | |/
           | * Use the Button class for all buttons
           | * Extract a generic Button class from the DownloadButton one


       The developer might want to rebase those commits to a newer master while keeping the branch
       topology, for example when the first topic branch is expected to be integrated into master
       much earlier than the second one, say, to resolve merge conflicts with changes to the
       DownloadButton class that made it into master.

       This rebase can be performed using the --rebase-merges option. It will generate a todo list
       looking like this:

           label onto

           # Branch: refactor-button
           reset onto
           pick 123456 Extract a generic Button class from the DownloadButton one
           pick 654321 Use the Button class for all buttons
           label refactor-button

           # Branch: report-a-bug
           reset refactor-button # Use the Button class for all buttons
           pick abcdef Add the feedback button
           label report-a-bug

           reset onto
           merge -C a1b2c3 refactor-button # Merge 'refactor-button'
           merge -C 6f5e4d report-a-bug # Merge 'report-a-bug'


       In contrast to a regular interactive rebase, there are label, reset and merge commands in
       addition to pick ones.

       The label command associates a label with the current HEAD when that command is executed.
       These labels are created as worktree-local refs (refs/rewritten/<label>) that will be deleted
       when the rebase finishes. That way, rebase operations in multiple worktrees linked to the
       same repository do not interfere with one another. If the label command fails, it is
       rescheduled immediately, with a helpful message how to proceed.

       The reset command resets the HEAD, index and worktree to the specified revision. It is
       similar to an exec git reset --hard <label>, but refuses to overwrite untracked files. If the
       reset command fails, it is rescheduled immediately, with a helpful message how to edit the
       todo list (this typically happens when a reset command was inserted into the todo list
       manually and contains a typo).

       The merge command will merge the specified revision(s) into whatever is HEAD at that time.
       With -C <original-commit>, the commit message of the specified merge commit will be used.
       When the -C is changed to a lower-case -c, the message will be opened in an editor after a
       successful merge so that the user can edit the message.

       If a merge command fails for any reason other than merge conflicts (i.e. when the merge
       operation did not even start), it is rescheduled immediately.

       By default, the merge command will use the ort merge strategy for regular merges, and octopus
       for octopus merges. One can specify a default strategy for all merges using the --strategy
       argument when invoking rebase, or can override specific merges in the interactive list of
       commands by using an exec command to call git merge explicitly with a --strategy argument.
       Note that when calling git merge explicitly like this, you can make use of the fact that the
       labels are worktree-local refs (the ref refs/rewritten/onto would correspond to the label
       onto, for example) in order to refer to the branches you want to merge.

       Note: the first command (label onto) labels the revision onto which the commits are rebased;
       The name onto is just a convention, as a nod to the --onto option.

       It is also possible to introduce completely new merge commits from scratch by adding a
       command of the form merge <merge-head>. This form will generate a tentative commit message
       and always open an editor to let the user edit it. This can be useful e.g. when a topic
       branch turns out to address more than a single concern and wants to be split into two or even
       more topic branches. Consider this todo list:

           pick 192837 Switch from GNU Makefiles to CMake
           pick 5a6c7e Document the switch to CMake
           pick 918273 Fix detection of OpenSSL in CMake
           pick afbecd http: add support for TLS v1.3
           pick fdbaec Fix detection of cURL in CMake on Windows


       The one commit in this list that is not related to CMake may very well have been motivated by
       working on fixing all those bugs introduced by switching to CMake, but it addresses a
       different concern. To split this branch into two topic branches, the todo list could be
       edited like this:

           label onto

           pick afbecd http: add support for TLS v1.3
           label tlsv1.3

           reset onto
           pick 192837 Switch from GNU Makefiles to CMake
           pick 918273 Fix detection of OpenSSL in CMake
           pick fdbaec Fix detection of cURL in CMake on Windows
           pick 5a6c7e Document the switch to CMake
           label cmake

           reset onto
           merge tlsv1.3
           merge cmake


CONFIGURATION
       rebase.backend
           Default backend to use for rebasing. Possible choices are apply or merge. In the future,
           if the merge backend gains all remaining capabilities of the apply backend, this setting
           may become unused.

       rebase.stat
           Whether to show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase. False by
           default.

       rebase.autoSquash
           If set to true enable --autosquash option by default.

       rebase.autoStash
           When set to true, automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation
           begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run rebase on a
           dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful
           rebase might result in non-trivial conflicts. This option can be overridden by the
           --no-autostash and --autostash options of git-rebase(1). Defaults to false.

       rebase.missingCommitsCheck
           If set to "warn", git rebase -i will print a warning if some commits are removed (e.g. a
           line was deleted), however the rebase will still proceed. If set to "error", it will
           print the previous warning and stop the rebase, git rebase --edit-todo can then be used
           to correct the error. If set to "ignore", no checking is done. To drop a commit without
           warning or error, use the drop command in the todo list. Defaults to "ignore".

       rebase.instructionFormat
           A format string, as specified in git-log(1), to be used for the todo list during an
           interactive rebase. The format will automatically have the long commit hash prepended to
           the format.

       rebase.abbreviateCommands
           If set to true, git rebase will use abbreviated command names in the todo list resulting
           in something like this:

                       p deadbee The oneline of the commit
                       p fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
                       ...

           instead of:

                       pick deadbee The oneline of the commit
                       pick fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
                       ...

           Defaults to false.

       rebase.rescheduleFailedExec
           Automatically reschedule exec commands that failed. This only makes sense in interactive
           mode (or when an --exec option was provided). This is the same as specifying the
           --reschedule-failed-exec option.

       rebase.forkPoint
           If set to false set --no-fork-point option by default.

       sequence.editor
           Text editor used by git rebase -i for editing the rebase instruction file. The value is
           meant to be interpreted by the shell when it is used. It can be overridden by the
           GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR environment variable. When not configured the default commit message
           editor is used instead.

GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite

NOTES
        1. revert-a-faulty-merge How-To
           file:///usr/share/doc/git/html/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.html

        2. filter-repo
           https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo



Git 2.34.1                                   02/26/2026                                GIT-REBASE(1)
git-rebase(1)
NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION OPTIONS
--keep-base --continue --abort --quit --apply --no-keep-empty, --keep-empty --reapply-cherry-picks, --no-reapply-cherry-picks --allow-empty-message --skip --edit-todo --show-current-patch -m, --merge --rerere-autoupdate, --no-rerere-autoupdate -S[], --gpg-sign[=], --no-gpg-sign -q, --quiet -v, --verbose --stat -n, --no-stat --no-verify --verify --no-ff, --force-rebase, -f --fork-point, --no-fork-point --ignore-whitespace --committer-date-is-author-date --ignore-date, --reset-author-date --signoff -i, --interactive -r, --rebase-merges[=(rebase-cousins|no-rebase-cousins)] --root --autosquash, --no-autosquash --autostash, --no-autostash --reschedule-failed-exec, --no-reschedule-failed-exec
INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES
Empty commits Directory rename detection Context Labelling of conflicts markers Hooks Interruptability Commit Rewording Miscellaneous differences
MERGE STRATEGIES NOTES INTERACTIVE MODE SPLITTING COMMITS RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE
The easy case The hard case
REBASING MERGES CONFIGURATION GIT NOTES

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