rebase in progress. Cannot commit. How to proceed or stop (abort)?

Question

Rebase doesn't happen in the background. "rebase in progress" means that you started a rebase, and the rebase got interrupted because of conflict. You have to resume the rebase (git rebase --continue) or abort it (git rebase --abort).

As the error message from git rebase --continue suggests, you asked git to apply a patch that results in an empty patch. Most likely, this means the patch was already applied and you want to drop it using git rebase --skip.

If git rebase --abort doesnt work and you still get

error: could not read '.git/rebase-apply/head-name': No such file or directory

Type:

git rebase --quit

I got stuck in 'rebase status', I got

On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

You are currently rebasing.
  (all conflicts fixed: run "git rebase --continue")

nothing to commit, working tree clean

but running git rebase --skip yielded error: could not read '.git/rebase-apply/head-name': No such file or directory.

Running rm -fr ".git/rebase-apply" helped.

Note: of course, do it only if you don't care about the rebase or if you're stuck on a previous rebase you don't want anymore.

• Step 1: Keep going git rebase --continue

• Step 2: fix CONFLICTS then git add .

• Back to step 1, now if it says no changes .. then run git rebase --skip and go back to step 1

• If you just want to quit rebase run git rebase --abort

• Once all changes are done run git commit -m "rebase complete" and you are done.

---

Note: If you don't know what's going on and just want to go back to where the repo was, then just do:

git rebase --abort

Read about rebase: git-rebase doc

You told your repository to rebase. It looks like you were on a commit (identified by SHA 9c168a5) and then did git rebase master or git pull --rebase master.

You are rebasing the branch master onto that commit. You can end the rebase via git rebase --abort. This would put back at the state that you were at before you started rebasing.

I got into this state recently. After resolving conflicts during a rebase, I committed my changes, rather than running git rebase --continue. This yields the same messages you saw when you ran your git status and git rebase --continue commands. I resolved the issue by running git rebase --abort, and then re-running the rebase. One could likely also skip the rebase, but I wasn't sure what state that would leave me in.

$ git rebase --continue
Applying: <commit message>
No changes - did you forget to use 'git add'?
If there is nothing left to stage, chances are that something else
already introduced the same changes; you might want to skip this patch.

When you have resolved this problem, run "git rebase --continue".
If you prefer to skip this patch, run "git rebase --skip" instead.
To check out the original branch and stop rebasing, run "git rebase --abort".

$ git status
rebase in progress; onto 4df0775
You are currently rebasing branch '<local-branch-name>' on '4df0775'.
  (all conflicts fixed: run "git rebase --continue")

nothing to commit, working directory clean