git rebase --onto

15 Feb 2020 | categories: tips

Have you ever branched off what you thought was master, done a bunch of work, only to then realise that you actually branched off staging, or some other branch? I have done that a few times and it’s mighty annoying. I used to just created a new branch and cherry-picked the commits from my failed branch. As is always the case with git, there is a command to fix this scenario.

Before getting to the meat of this tip I think it’s good to understand what happens when you rebase normally. The git rebase command takes two arguments git rebase [<upstream>] [<branch>], if you don’t supply the <branch> argument it will assume you want to use HEAD which is the current branch you’re on. For example, say you are on branch dev and you want to rebase with master (the branch that you branched off originally), you could write git rebase master dev or git rebase master. Git then takes all of the commits from dev, puts them in a temporary area then reapplies them one by one to the end of the upstream branch. In essence your branch goes from this

A--B--C--D   <--master
   |
   \--E--F   <-- dev

To this

A--B--C--D   <--master
         |
         \--E--F   <-- dev

We have changed what the base of our branch is, it used to be commit B and now it’s commit D. Nice and simple.

Now, say I had branched off dev accidentally and done some work and commited a change on my new branch dev2. I actually wanted master to be my base. Here is how things look.

A--B--C--D   <--master
   |
   \--E--F   <-- dev
      |
      \--G   <-- dev2

git rebase has an option called --onto which takes three arguments: git rebase [--onto <new base>] [<upstream> [<branch>]]. As before you can leave off the <branch> argument and git assumes you want to use HEAD, your current branch.

In this example our <new base> would be master, and our <upstream> is the branch that we originally branched off, so dev. To fix this little oopsie you just need to issue this command git rebase --onto master dev dev2 or git rebase --onto master dev.

After doing so branches will looks like this

A--B--C--D   <--master
   |     |
   |     \--G   <-- dev2
   |
   \--E--F   <-- dev

As always, I hope that is useful.