How I Got Out of a Knee Deep Git Problem

Git is easy to learn but hard to master. No matter how much you learn good chance you might screw something someday.

Problem

• I am not used to rebasing or squashing commits, my new project strictly follows this hence I was pushed to do this.

• I started with 4 commits which I had to squash

• git rebase -i HEAD~4 and squashed all the commits all were good

• But, as I pushed the code there was a conflict with the master

• If you remember you cannot merge hence I did a git rebase -i master

• Now I ended up having 10 more commits from god knows where

• I cannot push all of them, hence I squashed them all again, in spite of the commits not being mine

• I pushed my code, but the conflict was still there, at the brink of frustration I fixed the conflict in Github and left it there

• As expected, I was asked not to merge from master and revert it

• Now I am knee stuck with a merge, 9 commits squashed within which another 4 commits squashed

Solution - Git Reflog to the rescue

• git reflog has a history of all the commands you ever executed

• On running it I found the first squash I made

• git reset --hard <commit_id> took me to that commit

• One mistake I did last time when I rebased master was I didn't rebase from upstream so this time I ran git pull upstream master --rebase

• Now I did a git add . to add my changes to rebase

• git rebase --continue finishes the rebase successfully

• Finally git push origin --force <branch-name> to push the final version with no-conflicts and just my commits squashed into one.