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When is it recommended to use Git rebase vs. Git merge?
Do I still need to merge after a successful rebase?
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Reading the official Git manual it states that rebase “reapplies commits on top of another base branch” , whereas merge “joins two or more development histories together” . In other words, the key difference between merge and rebase is that while merge preserves history as it happened, rebase rewrites it .
The Rebase Option But, instead of using a merge commit, rebasing re-writes the project history by creating brand new commits for each commit in the original branch. The major benefit of rebasing is that you get a much cleaner project history. First, it eliminates the unnecessary merge commits required by git merge .
We use Git Rebase when the logs of the repository will not be referred by anyone else. To summarise, we can use Git Rebase, when we are working on branches, which cannot be seen by other developers. And we use Git Merge when the target and source branch can be viewed by other developers.
Merging takes the contents of a source branch and combines them with a target branch, to be more precise. Only the target branch is updated in this process. The history of the source branch remains similar. Git Rebase - Another way to integrate modifications from one branch to another is by Rebase.
The answer to the Git rebase vs. merge workflow question is –– “it depends.” At Perforce, we believe neither the “always merge” nor “always rebase” extreme is necessary. There are use cases for both. Rebasing privately affects only the individual (prior to work being pushed). Rebasing publicly impacts other people in the branch.
git rebase main This moves the entire feature branch to begin on the tip of the main branch, effectively incorporating all of the new commits in main. But, instead of using a merge commit, rebasing re-writes the project history by creating brand new commits for each commit in the original branch.
The major benefit of rebasing is that you get a much cleaner project history. First, it eliminates the unnecessary merge commits required by git merge.
This is why most rebase workflows recommend using rebase for all merges (and git pull --rebase for all pulls). Some people will state that the merge "destroys" the commit history because if you were to look at the log of only the master branch (A -- D) you would miss the important commit messages contained in B and C.
So when do you use either one?
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It's simple. With rebase you say to use another branch as the new base for your work.
If you have, for example, a branch master, you create a branch to implement a new feature, and say you name it cool-feature, of course, the master branch is the base for your new feature.
Now, at a certain point, you want to add the new feature you implemented in the master branch. You could just switch to master and merge the cool-feature branch:
$ git checkout master $ git merge cool-feature But this way a new dummy commit is added. If you want to avoid spaghetti-history you can rebase:
$ git checkout cool-feature $ git rebase master And then merge it in master:
$ git checkout master $ git merge cool-feature This time, since the topic branch has the same commits of master plus the commits with the new feature, the merge will be just a fast-forward.
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