Rewrite your git branch history

Ever had a pushed branch that is completed and ready for review but the git history is too long and full of commits wit.

How to

The process is very clear. You only have to get the changes, move your point to the branch you want to merge (usually master), unstage everything, creating new committs, and force push the changes.

Let us see the process step by step:

Revert all your commits

Assuming you are in a branch and want to do a clear history with respect to the master branch, the first step is doing:

# Note that if you are creating a pull request against main, you will have
# to use the branch main instead of master
git reset --soft master

This command will reset your head to master, but will keep all of your changes in the stage.

Unstage everything

git restore --staged .

This command will out all your changes from the stage, hence preparing all files for being added once again to the stage commit by commit, but this time with a beautiful and meaningfull history, by you.

Add and commit as you wish

For each group of files you want to add to a commit, add them to stage and make a commit:

# Assume there are modifications in file1.rb, file2.rb and file3.rb
git add file1.rb file2.rb
git commit -m "feat: new feature that is exciting"

git add file3.rb
git commit -m "fix: file 3 had a bug"

Push your modifications

If you type now git status, you will get a message about that your branch and the origin branch have diverted. So you have to force the change with

git push --force

The --force parameter is what causes the remote branch rewrite.

Conclusion

Do not pay attention to making good commit messages or to divide your work in commits. You only need to know some commands to rewrite the history of your branch posteriorly. Hence, you can get a clear and meaninful commit history, ready for the your team mates' review.