Clear Commit History - egnomerator/misc GitHub Wiki

SO Question

This link is to a Stack Overflow post asking

How to squash all git commits into one?

My chosen answer

Push with Force flag

• If performing the below operation(s) results in re-writing public history, then pushing changes with require the force flag

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note: after performing this operation, to apply the changes to the remote branch, do a force push

My personal use case for this action was the following:

• I had a long commit history in my git repository for this github wiki
• I wanted to just clear the commit history and continue from a "clean start"
• I don't see a likely scenario where this operation would be desireable in a professional context (not saying never, just not likely or common)

In case the included links ever break, here is the pertinent information from the Stack Overflow post

How to squash all git commits into one?

How do you squash your entire repository down to the first commit?

I can rebase to the first commit, but that would leave me with 2 commits. Is there a way to reference the commit before the first one?

My chosen answer (also in top section "helpful links")

• more than one answer was given, but I found this one best for my purposes
  • specifically Alternative solution #1: orphan branches

If all you want to do is squash all of your commits down to the root commit, then while

git rebase --interactive --root

can work, it's impractical for a large number of commits (for example, hundreds of commits), because the rebase operation will probably run very slowly to generate the interactive rebase editor commit list, as well as run the rebase itself.

Here are two quicker and more efficient solutions when you're squashing a large number of commits:

Alternative solution #1: orphan branches

You can simply create a new orphan branch at the tip (i.e. the most recent commit) of your current branch. This orphan branch forms the initial root commit of an entirely new and separate commit history tree, which is effectively equivalent to squashing all of your commits:

git checkout --orphan new-master master
git commit -m "Enter commit message for your new initial commit"

# Overwrite the old master branch reference with the new one
git branch -M new-master master

Documentation:

• git-checkout(1) Manual Page.

Alternative solution #2: soft reset

Another efficient solution is to simply use a mixed or soft reset to the root commit <root>:

git branch beforeReset

git reset --soft <root>
git commit --amend

# Verify that the new amended root is no different
# from the previous branch state
git diff beforeReset

Documentation:

• git-reset(1) Manual Page.