$ git pull origin master. This command downloads the remote repository branch “master” into our local repo. Next, I created three text files in the local repository. This is followed by running the git add command under the master branch: $ git add tst1.txt $ git add tst2.txt $ git add tst2.txt. Distributed version control systems like Git give you flexibility in how you use version control to share and manage code. Your team should find a balance between this flexibility and the need to collaborate and share code in a consistent manner. Team members publish, share, review, and iterate on code changes through Git branches shared with. Git Source Code Mirror - This is a publish-only repository and all pull requests are ignored. Please follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches procedure for any of your. Wrapped in a single session, you'll find the concepts and techniques that convert the average Git practitioner into a master of the craft. We'll go from tech.
Distributed version control systems like Git give you flexibility in how you use version control to share and manage code.Your team should find a balance between this flexibility and the need to collaborate and share code in a consistent manner.
Team members publish, share, review, and iterate on code changes through Git branches shared with others.Adopt a branching strategy for your team. You can collaborate better and spend less time managing version control and more time developing code.
The following branching strategies are based on the way we use Git here at Microsoft. For more information, see How we use Git at Microsoft.
Keep your branch strategy simple
Keep your branch strategy simple. Build your strategy from these three concepts:
- Use feature branches for all new features and bug fixes.
- Merge feature branches into the main branch using pull requests.
- Keep a high quality, up-to-date main branch.
A strategy that extends these concepts and avoids contradictions will result in a version control workflow for your team that is consistent and easy to follow.
Use feature branches for your work
Develop your features and fix bugs in feature branches based off your main branch. These branches are also known as topic branches.Feature branches isolate work in progress from the completed work in the main branch.Git branches are inexpensive to create and maintain. Even small fixes and changes should have their own feature branch.
Creating feature branches for all your changes makes reviewing history simple. Look at the commits made in the branch and look at the pull request that merged the branch.
Name your feature branches by convention
Use a consistent naming convention for your feature branches to identify the work done in the branch.You can also include other information in the branch name, such as who created the branch.
Some suggestions for naming your feature branches:

- users/username/description
- users/username/workitem
- bugfix/description
- feature/feature-name
- feature/feature-area/feature-name
- hotfix/description
Note
For information on setting policies to enforce a branch naming strategy, see Require branch folders.
Use feature flags to manage long-running branches

Learn more about using feature flags in your code.
Review and merge code with pull requests
The review that takes place in a pull request is critical for improving code quality.Only merge branches through pull requests that pass your review process.Avoid merging branches to the main branch without a pull request.
Reviews in pull requests take time to complete. Your team should agree on what's expected from pull request creators and reviewers.Distribute reviewer responsibilities to share ideas across your team and spread out knowledge of your codebase.
Some suggestions for successful pull requests:
- Two reviewers is an optimal number based on research.
- If your team already has a code review process, bring pull requests into what you're already doing.
- Take care assigning the same reviewers to a large number of pull requests. Pull requests work better when reviewer responsibilities are shared across the team.
- Provide enough detail in the description to quickly bring reviewers up to speed with your changes.
- Include a build or linked version of your changes running in a staged environment with your pull request. Others can easily test the changes.
Keep a high quality, up-to-date main branch
The code in your main branch should pass tests, build cleanly, and always be current.Your main branch needs these qualities so that feature branches created by your team start from a known good version of code.
Set up a branch policy for your main branch that:
- Requires a pull request to merge code. This approach prevents direct pushes to the main branch and ensures discussion of proposed changes.
- Automatically adds reviewers when a pull request is created. The added team members review the code and comment on the changes in the pull request.
- Requires a successful build to complete a pull request. Code merged into the main branch should build cleanly.
Tip
The build pipeline for your pull requests should be quick to complete, so it doesn't interfere with the review process.
Manage releases
Use release branches to coordinate and stabilize changes in a release of your code.This branch is long-lived and isn't merged back into the main branch in a pull request, unlike the feature branches.Create as many release branches as you need. Keep in mind that each active release branch represents another version of the code you need to support.Lock release branches when you're ready to stop supporting a particular release.
Use release branches
Create a release branch from the main branch when you get close to your release or other milestone, such as the end of a sprint.Give this branch a clear name associating it with the release, for example release/20.
Create branches to fix bugs from the release branch and merge them back into the release branch in a pull request.

Port changes back to the main branch
Make sure that fixes land in both your release branch and your main branch.One approach is to make fixes in the release branch, then bring changes into your main branch to prevent regression in your code.Another approach (and the one employed by the Azure DevOps team) is to always make changes in the mainline, then port those to the release branch.You can read more about our Release Flow strategy.
In this topic, we'll cover making changes in the release branch and porting them into mainline.Use cherry-picking instead of merging so that you have exact control over which commits are ported back to the main branch.Merging the feature branch into the main branch can bring over release-specific changes you don't want in the main branch.
Update the main branch with a change made in the release branch with these steps:
- Create a new feature branch off the main branch to port the changes.
- Cherry-pick the changes from the release branch to your new feature branch.
- Merge the feature branch back into the main branch in a second pull request.
This release branch workflow keeps the pillars of the basic workflow intact: feature branches, pull requests, and a strong main branch that always has the latest version of the code.
Why not use tags for releases?
Other branching workflows use Git tags to mark a specific commit as a release.Tags are useful for marking points in your history as important. Tags introduce extra steps in your workflow that aren't necessary if you're using branches for your releases.
Tags are maintained and pushed separately from your commits.Team members can easily miss tagging a commit and then have to go back through the history afterwards to fix the tag.You can also forget the extra step to push the tag, leaving the next developer working from an older version of the code when supporting the release.
The release branch strategy extends the basic feature branch workflow to handle releases.Your team doesn't have to adopt any new version control process other than the cherry-pick to port changes.
Manage deployments
You can handle multiple deployments of your code in the same way you handle multiple releases.Create a clear naming convention, such as deploy/performance-test, and treat the environment branches like release branches.Your team should agree on a process to update deployment branches with the code from your main branch.Cherry-pick bug fixes in the deployment branch back to the main branch. Use the same steps as porting changes from a release branch.
An exception to this recommendation is if you're using a form of continuous deployment.Use Azure Pipelines when working with continuous deployment to promote builds from your main branch to your deployment targets.
Master Guitarists
Videos
This document will serve as an in-depth discussion of the git rebase command. The Rebase command has also been looked at on the setting up a repository and rewriting history pages. This page will take a more detailed look at git rebase configuration and execution. Common Rebase use cases and pitfalls will be covered here.
Rebase is one of two Git utilities that specializes in integrating changes from one branch onto another. The other change integration utility is git merge. Merge is always a forward moving change record. Alternatively, rebase has powerful history rewriting features. For a detailed look at Merge vs. Rebase, visit our Merging vs Rebasing guide. Rebase itself has 2 main modes: 'manual' and 'interactive' mode. We will cover the different Rebase modes in more detail below.
What is git rebase?
Rebasing is the process of moving or combining a sequence of commits to a new base commit. Rebasing is most useful and easily visualized in the context of a feature branching workflow. The general process can be visualized as the following:
From a content perspective, rebasing is changing the base of your branch from one commit to another making it appear as if you'd created your branch from a different commit. Internally, Git accomplishes this by creating new commits and applying them to the specified base. It's very important to understand that even though the branch looks the same, it's composed of entirely new commits.
Usage
The primary reason for rebasing is to maintain a linear project history. For example, consider a situation where the master branch has progressed since you started working on a feature branch. You want to get the latest updates to the master branch in your feature branch, but you want to keep your branch's history clean so it appears as if you've been working off the latest master branch. This gives the later benefit of a clean merge of your feature branch back into the master branch. Why do we want to maintain a 'clean history'? The benefits of having a clean history become tangible when performing Git operations to investigate the introduction of a regression. A more real-world scenario would be:
- A bug is identified in the master branch. A feature that was working successfully is now broken.
- A developer examines the history of the master branch using
git logbecause of the 'clean history' the developer is quickly able to reason about the history of the project. - The developer can not identify when the bug was introduced using
git logso the developer executes agit bisect. - Because the git history is clean,
git bisecthas a refined set of commits to compare when looking for the regression. The developer quickly finds the commit that introduced the bug and is able to act accordingly.
Learn more about git log and git bisect on their individual usage pages.
You have two options for integrating your feature into the master branch: merging directly or rebasing and then merging. The former option results in a 3-way merge and a merge commit, while the latter results in a fast-forward merge and a perfectly linear history. The following diagram demonstrates how rebasing onto the master branch facilitates a fast-forward merge.
Rebasing is a common way to integrate upstream changes into your local repository. Pulling in upstream changes with Git merge results in a superfluous merge commit every time you want to see how the project has progressed. On the other hand, rebasing is like saying, “I want to base my changes on what everybody has already done.”
Don't rebase public history
As we've discussed previously in rewriting history, you should never rebase commits once they've been pushed to a public repository. The rebase would replace the old commits with new ones and it would look like that part of your project history abruptly vanished.
Git Rebase Standard vs Git Rebase Interactive
Git rebase interactive is when git rebase accepts an -- i argument. This stands for 'Interactive.' Without any arguments, the command runs in standard mode. In both cases, let's assume we have created a separate feature branch.
Git rebase in standard mode will automatically take the commits in your current working branch and apply them to the head of the passed branch.
This automatically rebases the current branch onto , which can be any kind of commit reference (for example an ID, a branch name, a tag, or a relative reference to HEAD).
Running git rebase with the -i flag begins an interactive rebasing session. Instead of blindly moving all of the commits to the new base, interactive rebasing gives you the opportunity to alter individual commits in the process. This lets you clean up history by removing, splitting, and altering an existing series of commits. It's like Git commit --amend on steroids.
This rebases the current branch onto but uses an interactive rebasing session. This opens an editor where you can enter commands (described below) for each commit to be rebased. These commands determine how individual commits will be transferred to the new base. You can also reorder the commit listing to change the order of the commits themselves. Once you've specified commands for each commit in the rebase, Git will begin playing back commits applying the rebase commands. The rebasing edit commands are as follows:
Additional rebase commands
As detailed in the rewriting history page, rebasing can be used to change older and multiple commits, committed files, and multiple messages. While these are the most common applications, git rebase also has additional command options that can be useful in more complex applications.
git rebase -- dmeans during playback the commit will be discarded from the final combined commit block.git rebase -- pleaves the commit as is. It will not modify the commit's message or content and will still be an individual commit in the branches history.git rebase -- xduring playback executes a command line shell script on each marked commit. A useful example would be to run your codebase's test suite on specific commits, which may help identify regressions during a rebase.
Recap
Interactive rebasing gives you complete control over what your project history looks like. This affords a lot of freedom to developers, as it lets them commit a 'messy' history while they're focused on writing code, then go back and clean it up after the fact.
Most developers like to use an interactive rebase to polish a feature branch before merging it into the main code base. This gives them the opportunity to squash insignificant commits, delete obsolete ones, and make sure everything else is in order before committing to the “official” project history. To everybody else, it will look like the entire feature was developed in a single series of well-planned commits.
The real power of interactive rebasing can be seen in the history of the resulting master branch. To everybody else, it looks like you're a brilliant developer who implemented the new feature with the perfect amount of commits the first time around. This is how interactive rebasing can keep a project's history clean and meaningful.
Configuration options
There are a few rebase properties that can be set using git config. These options will alter the git rebase output look and feel.
rebase.stat: A boolean that is set to false by default. The option toggles display of visual diffstat content that shows what changed since the last debase.
rebase.autoSquash:A boolean value that toggles the--autosquashbehavior.
rebase.missingCommitsCheck:Can be set to multiple values which change rebase behavior around missing commits.
warn | Prints warning output in interactive mode which warns of removed commits |
| Stops the rebase and prints removed commit warning messages |
| Set by default this ignores any missing commit warnings |
rebase.instructionFormat:Agit logformat string that will be used for formatting interactive rebase display
Advanced rebase application
The command line argument --onto can be passed to git rebase. When in git rebase --onto mode the command expands to:
The --onto command enables a more powerful form or rebase that allows passing specific refs to be the tips of a rebase.
Let’s say we have an example repo with branches like:
featureB is based on featureA, however, we realize featureB is not dependent on any of the changes in featureA and could just be branched off master.
featureA is the < oldbase >. master becomes the < newbase > and featureB is reference for what HEAD of the < newbase > will point to. The results are then:
Master Gita Master Life
Understanding the dangers of rebase
One caveat to consider when working with Git Rebase is merge conflicts may become more frequent during a rebase workflow. This occurs if you have a long-lived branch that has strayed from master. Eventually you will want to rebase against master and at that time it may contain many new commits that your branch changes may conflict with. This is easily remedied by rebasing your branch frequently against master, and making more frequent commits. The --continue and --abort command line arguments can be passed to git rebase to advance or reset the the rebase when dealing with conflicts.
A more serious rebase caveat is lost commits from interactive history rewriting. Running rebase in interactive mode and executing subcommands like squash or drop will remove commits from your branche's immediate log. At first glance this can appear as though the commits are permanently gone. Using git reflog these commits can be restored and the entire rebase can be undone. For more info on using git reflog to find lost commits, visit our Git reflog documentation page.
Git Rebase itself is not seriously dangerous. The real danger cases arise when executing history rewriting interactive rebases and force pushing the results to a remote branch that's shared by other users. This is a pattern that should be avoided as it has the capability to overwrite other remote users' work when they pull.
Recovering from upstream rebase
If another user has rebased and force pushed to the branch that you’re committing to, a git pull will then overwrite any commits you have based off that previous branch with the tip that was force pushed. Luckily, using git reflog you can get the reflog of the remote branch. On the remote branch's reflog you can find a ref before it was rebased. You can then rebase your branch against that remote ref using the --onto option as discussed above in the Advanced Rebase Application section.
Summary
In this article we covered git rebase usage. We discussed basic and advanced use cases and more advanced examples. Some key discussion points are:
Master Gita Master Life
- git rebase standard vs interactive modes
- git rebase configuration options
- git rebase --onto
- git rebase lost commits
We looked at git rebase usage with other tools like git reflog, git fetch, and git push. Visit their corresponding pages for further information.
Next up:
git reflog
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