Rebasing

Note: you can similar visualizations to used here using:

git log --oneline graph HEAD origin/main main

Say you have a branch my-feature which is based on top of the main branch:

* Y (my-feature)
* X
* A (main)
* B
* R
.
.
.

Then someone rebased the main branch onto a different branch, s.t. after running git fetch origin we get the following situation. An accent is used to indicate a commit with similar changes, but based on a different parent commit.

* B' (origin/main)
* A'
* P
| * Y (my-feature, origin/my-feature)
| * X
| * A (main)
| * B
|/
* R
.
.
.

What we want to do is to reapply the changes X and Y on top of origin/main and have that be the new my-feature branch. This is called rebasing.

In this specific case we want to do:

# Let A be the SHA of the last commit on main before that got force pushed!
git rebase A --onto origin/main --rebase-merges

The --interactive flag can be used to give a list of commits that will be rebased. This can be useful to check if your SHA is set properly.

After this we will have the following situation:

* Y' (my-feature)
* X'
* B' (origin/main)
* A'
* P
| * Y (origin/my-feature)
| * X
| * A (main)
| * B
|/
* R
.
.
.

We then update our local main branch and update the feature branch.

# you already are on the my-feature branch
git push -f
# need to update our main branch too
git checkout main
git pull

Which then clears out the stale branches

* Y' (my-feature, origin/my-feature)
* X'
* B' (main, origin/main)
* A'
* P
* R
.
.
.